Bashar's Second-Term: Now For the Hard Part

When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, few could predict how the country would fare in the hands of his son and political heir, Bashar. Much of the conventional wisdom felt that young “Dr. Bashar” was simply too inexperienced to overcome the Machiavellian back stabbing of the Baath Party regime's entrenched Old Guard. Others thought that as a member of a modern, younger generation, Bashar would open the country to political and economic freedoms unheard of in the reigns of Syrian dictators stretching back to independence. Neither outlook has turned out to be true. The conventional wisdom now is that Bashar is every bit the strongman his father was.

The old Lion of Damascus

In the last seven years, Bashar has gradually cleared out the entire Old Guard and replaced it with loyalists of his own, putting crucial instruments of power, as his father once did, in the hands of a few close relatives. Despite a youthful flirtation with democracy in his first year in office, Bashar has also steadily cracked down on all opposition and expressions of dissent. Recently, his regime has imprisoned a Who's Who of Syrian democrats—Anwar al-Bunni, Kamal Labwani, Michel Kilo, Mahmoud Issa, Suleiman Shummar and Khalil Hussein.

Such is the poor state of democratization in Syria that on Sunday the regime is holding not a multiparty presidential election but a yes-no referendum of the sort that effectively had made Hafez President-For-Life. Sunday's referendum, the last of its kind in the Arab world—Saddam Hussein held them in Iraq before he was toppled; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak switched to a multiparty ballot two years ago—assures Bashar another seven-year term of office.

The old CW had merit. As a younger man, Bashar clearly signaled his lack of interest in the family business when he went off to London to become an ophthalmologist. During his stay abroad he met his future wife Asma, a striking British-born Syrian woman who had worked as a banker for J.P. Morgan in New York. Bashar was only summoned back to Syria and into politics when his brother Basil, Hafez's hand-picked successor, suddenly died in a car crash in 1994. At the time of Hafez's death, Bashar was several years short of the minimum age to be president, so the parliament had to quickly change the constitution to make him eligible.

If Bashar has been able to match his father's iron grip on power in Damascus, he has proved to be less adept in advancing the Syrian regime's international and regional interests. He abandoned his father's trademark approach of carefully balancing friends and enemies in such a way that Syria was simultaneously welcomed as a potential partner and feared as a prospective spoiler. Under Hafez, Syria successfully helped foil Israel's ambitions in Lebanon but Damascus also entered protracted peace negotiations with the Jewish state (and also allied itself with Washington against Iraq in Desert Storm).

Instead, Bashar threw his lot in with the region's radical forces, solidifying his father's wary relationship with Iran and championing the causes of the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim group Hizballah and the Palestinian Hamas faction. Bashar's regime has also facilitated the Iraq insurgency against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces by giving safe passage to Iraqi Baathists and Arab jihadists. In response, the Bush administration has sought to isolate Damascus, with some success. Key Arab governments have largely ostracized Bashar, especially after a speech last summer in which he indirectly referred to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt as “half-men” for declining to back Hizballah in the Lebanon war with Israel.

Bashar's biggest blunder has been in Lebanon, where the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005 triggered a mass uprising against the Assad Dynasty's three-decade control of the country and forced the ignominious withdrawal of Syrian troops. Although Bashar strongly denies Syrian involvement in Hariri's killing, a U.N. investigation has implicated his brother and brother-in-law in the plot and cited reports that Bashar himself personally threatened Hariri before the assassination. Suspicion of Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri as well as many other anti-Syrian Lebanese figures has plunged the regime into further isolation. Although Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice met her Syrian counterpart in May to discuss efforts to stabilize Iraq, the U.S. continues to downgrade relations with Syria and refuses to return the American ambassador to Damascus. Syria's isolation may deepen further this week if the U.N. approves an international tribunal to prosecute Hariri's suspected assassins. Although again Syria denies a connection, the Lebanese government is accusing the Assad regime of sponsoring the militant Fatah al-Islam action at the center of the current turmoil in Lebanon.

Although Bashar appears firmly in control in Syria, his growing international troubles have exposed serious internal fissures. In late 2005, Abdul Halim Khaddam, a retired Syrian vice president, leading Sunni politician and one of Hafez's trusted lieutenants, defected to France and accused Bashar's regime of conspiring against Hariri. Khaddam has formed an alliance with the banned Muslim Brotherhood, breathing some life into an opposition movement that had been dormant since the early 1980s. The Hariri assassination also appeared to take a toll within the minority Alawaite community from which the Assads hail; Ghazi Kenaan, long Syria's point man in Lebanon, died in his office shortly after being interviewed by U.N. investigators. Officials said he shot himself, but speculation was rife that the regime eliminated him as a potential damaging witness in the Hariri case and as a potential rival to Bashar.

Syria's unlikely president has shown himself to be a much bolder, risk-taking leader than many imagined when he took up residence in Damascus's presidential palace in 2000. But with the Middle East in a widening crisis--after 9/11, the Iraq war, the Palestinian intifadah, internal Syrian opposition, the Lebanon problem and the looming international tribunal in the Hariri assassination--Bashar's second term will be the crucial test. It will determine if he is really up to being Syria's president, or whether he and his countrymen would have been better off had he had stuck with ophthalmology.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo