Bidding for a Bigger Role: Syria seeks to become the prime Arab power

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are not great." By strengthening military ties with Israel two weeks ago, the Reagan Administration signaled that it was picking up the stick. Yet other Middle East experts point out that America achieved its greatest success with Syria by using carrots: Secretary of State Kissinger shuttled to Damascus more than 30 times to obtain a Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement on the Golan Heights, a pact that is still in force. Says a staff member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "In the current round, we've refused to engage in that kind of stroking. We need to cater a bit to Assad's vanity."

But the realities have changed since 1974, both for Assad at home and in the Middle East at large. No longer is Syria a third-rate military power. No longer is Egypt the unchallenged leader of the Arab world, a change that has opened a power vacuum for Damascus to fill. Now, and not then, Israeli soldiers face Syrian troops across a tense 37-mile front in Lebanon and 1,800 U.S. Marines are bunkered in Beirut. Assad's illness, no matter how quickly he recovers, just complicates an already impossible situation. "No war is possible without Egypt, and no peace is possible without Syria," Henry Kissinger once said. It is a measure of how far Syria has come under Hafez Assad that while the first part of that statement is no longer completely valid, the last part rings truer than ever.

—By James Kelly. Reported by Barrett Seaman/Washington and Roberto Suro/ Damascus, with other bureaus

^{* The true age of Damascus is unknown. Muslims revere the spot as the site of the Garden of Eden, while the Bible says the city existed before Abraham's time. Archaeologists contend that Damascus was occupied as far back as the third millennium B.C.}