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David Ignatius...columnist

 
 
rayban1
 
Reply Fri 27 May, 2005 07:32 pm
The following article about Syria and it's young ruler is very even handed and my respect for David Ignatius has grown over the past few months because he appears to take very seriously his responsibility to report events as they actually happen. Even though he is forced to do some analysis it is done without any evidence of political agenda or to force the reader to arrive at some preconceived conclusion.

In Syria, Weighing Risks

By David Ignatius

Friday, May 27, 2005; Page A27

Let us try to read the mind of Syria's president, Bashar Assad, as he prepares for a June 6 congress of his ruling Baath Party that he hopes will ease the pressure on his beleaguered regime.

Assad wants to raise the flag of political reform at the party congress, but not too high. He wants to be like China's Deng Xiaoping, managing a transition to a free-market economy while also maintaining political discipline. But he may instead end up like the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, setting in motion a process of limited reform that will undermine the party and ultimately destroy his regime.


The agenda for the party congress is still being debated in Damascus, but here's what Assad is considering: The congress will endorse free-market reforms in Syria's state-run economy. That's the easy part. Syrians are tired of being poor.

The harder task for the congress is political reform. Assad is weighing a change in the constitution to remove a reference to the Baath Party as "the leader of society." Old-line Baathists argue that doing so would remove the party's legitimacy. Reformers want Assad to resign his own membership in the party, as a signal that a new age has arrived. He's likely to seek a middle ground; some diminution of the party, but not too much.

The Baathists will probably announce rules that allow opposition political parties to form, so long as they have a "national platform." That's code for nonsectarian, and it illustrates a crucial dynamic in Syrian politics. Assad and much of the rest of the ruling elite come from a small Shiite Muslim sect known as the Alawites. Religious parties are seen as a dangerous reminder of the bloody battles of the early 1980s, when his father, Hafez Assad, used tanks to put down an uprising in Hama by Sunnis in the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

The Alawite-Sunni tensions are slowly easing, thanks partly to intermarriage. Assad and his brother Maher both married Sunni women and are said to be raising their children as Sunnis. That's the pattern with many secular Alawites; religious Alawites, meanwhile, are embracing Shiite Islam.

Assad knows that many Syrians see the Baath Party as corrupt and incompetent. But over the next several years, he hopes the party can rehabilitate itself as the defender of the weak. He knows that capitalism will mean sudden wealth for the Sunni merchant class of Damascus and Aleppo; these rising Sunnis will form a secular, cosmopolitan political party. Assad sees a role for the Baath Party as the protector of rural Syrians left behind in the new prosperity.

A last big symbolic issue for the Baath congress is the "emergency law" that keeps Syria in what amounts to a state of permanent martial law. Assad is weighing whether to abolish the law entirely or restrict it more narrowly to real breaches of national security. The emergency law is a symbol of Syria's continuing state of war with Israel, which is at once the regime's thorniest problem and its reason for existence.

What has brought Assad to this crossroads, of course, is the debacle of the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Assad insists to intimates that he wasn't responsible for the murder of Lebanese opposition leader Rafiq Hariri. But he realizes that he blundered by accepting the advice of Syria's old guard (bolstered by its Lebanese clients) to impose an additional term for pro-Syrian president Emile Lahoud last year. When Lebanese rose up by the hundreds of thousands to protest Syria's continuing occupation after Hariri's murder, Assad concluded that keeping his army in Lebanon was a loser and decided to withdraw the troops. Some Syrians believe Assad is quietly purging the senior intelligence and foreign policy officials who managed the old Lebanon policy; others aren't sure he has the political clout.

Assad would like American support for his "reform" agenda, but he knows that's unlikely. Indeed, whatever Assad does with the Bush administration seems to backfire: After Syria quietly acceded to U.S. demands and turned Saddam Hussein's half-brother Sabawi over to the U.S. military early this year, Assad expected that intelligence cooperation would improve. But these intelligence links withered in the uproar over Lebanon after Hariri's murder. Lacking American support, Assad will have to try to convince Europeans that his domestic reform efforts are serious.

When Assad took power in 2000, many U.S. officials hoped he would bring real change to Syria. Five years later, they're still waiting. So are millions of restless Syrians. The danger for Assad is that if he takes only half-measures on political reform, he will lose what support he has left on the Syrian street. This may be one of those situations where being too cautious is the riskiest course of all.

davidignatius@washpost.com
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rayban1
 
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Reply Fri 27 May, 2005 11:27 pm
Guess no one is interested in learning anything about Syria......keep your heads in the sand.
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joefromchicago
 
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Reply Sat 28 May, 2005 06:30 am
rayban1 wrote:
Guess no one is interested in learning anything about Syria......keep your heads in the sand.

Ouch, we've been scolded.
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