Syria: Creation of the Modern Middle East

After the Lion

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.

In addition, the country had long been on the United States’ list of countries that support terrorism. Terrorist training camps had operated within Syria for many years, and their graduates went forth bent on the destruction of Israel and Israel’s supporters. Although there was no evidence to link Syria with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the United States viewed any nation with links to terrorism as a possible threat. It was not good policy to be on bad terms with the world’s only remaining superpower.

Hafez al-Assad was 69 and afflicted with a variety of serious ailments when he died. Knowing death was near, he began to groom Bashar as his successor. It was well known that Assad would have preferred his eldest son, Basil, a dashing military officer, to rule after his death, but Basil had been killed in a car crash in 1994.

So, Bashar was brought home from England, where he had been practicing ophthalmology, to begin training as the new leader of a land that had been trampled over and mauled for 4,000 years by most of the mighty empires of Earth, where corruption and inefficiency were rampant, and where many powerful men were looking askance at this young man and wondering if he was up to the job.

During Bashar’s “training,” his father gave him diplomatic tasks to perform, and he was pushed onto the public stage as much as possible so that he would not be a total unknown when his father died. In addition, father and son purged the administration of those who objected to the planned succession.