Appointment in Damascus

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The official photograph of Syrian President Bashar Assad is extremely stern. The photos and murals of his father and predecessor Hafez Assad, still festooned throughout Syria, are leavened by the confident gaze and beneficent smile possible only for a dictator in total control. Bashar, however, stares off into the middle distance, working hard to convey vision and strength but avoiding direct eye contact with his subjects. Indeed, the younger Assad, an ophthalmologist by trade who became heir apparent only when his older brother was killed in an automobile crash, remains something of a mystery to just about everyone. "The question is, Is he really in charge?" a U.S. intelligence expert told me. "Is Syria singular or plural?"

I spent a few hours with Assad last week at his private office in the hills overlooking Damascus and found the singular-or-plural question unanswerable. It was a terrible day for Syria's President. Thousands of people were in the streets of Lebanon demanding that his troops withdraw from the country they have occupied since the mid-'70s. A few hours after our meeting, the pro-Syrian Lebanese government resigned. Damascus-based leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad had taken credit for a Tel Aviv nightclub bombing that had killed five.

Saddam Hussein's half-brother had just been arrested, perhaps with Syrian cooperation, and Assad had to decide whether he wanted to take credit for helping the U.S.

Assad greeted me at the door, a tall but unassuming man with clear blue eyes. We sat down and I tried a joke: "Mr. President, you've done the impossible. You've brought the United States and France together against you in Lebanon." He laughed. "It's not me, actually," he said, then added ruefully, "but that's what people think." His tone was easy, conversational. He did not bellow or lecture, not even when he attempted to dispense patently ridiculous propaganda. But it was an odd conversation nonetheless, reflecting the jittery uncertainty of the Syrian regime in the face of massive international pressure. On Lebanon, Assad clearly indicated that a political decision had been made to withdraw Syria's troops and the only questions now were "technical": how much time it would take to move heavy equipment and rebuild fortifications on the border. He said he had not yet met with his generals about that. At the end of the interview, I asked again when Syrian troops would withdraw, and he responded, "Out completely?" I said yes. "It should be very soon and maybe in the next few months, not after that," he said. "I can't give you the technical answer. The point is, the next few months."

Two days later, however, the Syrian government issued a correction: the President hadn't really been talking about a total withdrawal but about compliance with the 1989 Taif Agreement ending Lebanon's long civil war. This wasn't the first time the Syrian government retracted or corrected or denied things that the President had said. In the days after last month's assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Assad told Arab League President Amr Moussa that he was planning to withdraw from Lebanon, only to have the Syrian Information Minister later say that Moussa had got it wrong—Syria was only redeploying its troops to the Bekaa Valley. The tap dance continued all week, culminating in Assad's speech to the Syrian Parliament on Saturday, in which he scuttled back to his pre-Moussa position: no mention of complete withdrawal but the promise of gradual redeployment to the Bekaa Valley. "It is an embarrassment," said Ayman Abdul Nour, founder of the All4Syria website and an Assad supporter who is hoping for reform of the ruling Baath Party. "We always hope for delay. If we can delay withdrawal, the Lebanese will start to fight among themselves, the Americans will turn their attention to Iran, the French will be caught in internal politics. But this situation is different. The spotlight is on us.

The President has to make some big decisions, both externally and about internal reform."