Syria: Creation of the Modern Middle East
Bashar al-Assad was too young to be president. The Syrian constitution said the president had to be 40 years old, and Bashar was only 34. Since his father, Hafez al-Assad, the man who had ruled Syria with an iron hand for 30 years, had chosen him as his successor, the constitution was quickly changed. Hafez al-Assad died on June 10, 2000, while talking on the telephone to the president of Lebanon. Some observers saw symbolism in the way he died—a conversation unfinished, as he had left unfinished not only his part in peace negotiations with Israel, with whom Syria was still technically at war, but the process of bringing his troubled and underdeveloped country into the twenty-first century. The question on everybody’s mind that desperate June was whether Bashar, the mild-mannered eye doctor and computer whiz with no military or government background to speak of, could carry on the legacy of the “Lion of Damascus” (Assad means “lion” in Arabic) while at the same time taking at least some steps in the direction of modernization of a country generally viewed as a “backwater” of the Middle East. In a New York Times article, Thomas L. Friedman described Syria at the time of Hafez’s death as “the last country in the Middle East to introduce fax machines and the Internet, a country with a crumbling industrial base, a corrupt, 19th-century banking system, an utterly backward educational system, and not a single worldclass export of any product or service”—a harsh indictment of the 30-year rule of Hafez al-Assad.... | 
