Syria: THE PEACE CONFLICT

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If there is a clue to the future of Middle East peace, it may be in the fresher look that President Hafez Assad's defiant old regime is sporting these days. Almost gone are the giant Orwellian portraits of the Syrian leader that once seemed to loom over every traffic intersection. Instead, less threatening pictures of Assad's son and heir apparent Bashar, 34, decorate billboards and shopwindows from the Damascus suq to the Mediterranean coast. The favorite depicts Assad in an almost holy trinity with Bashar and Basil, Assad's idealized eldest boy and chosen successor until his car-crash death in 1994. Syrians are calling the ubiquitous montage Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

A transition of power is under way in Syria, and with it could come the best chance for regional peace since Israel was founded 51 years ago. That may not be the way it looks from Washington, where officials are struggling to get the two sides just to sit down together. Yet inside Syria, Assad, 69, ailing with heart disease, diabetes and prostate problems, appears increasingly anxious to ensure Bashar's position and with it the Assad legacy. And to make that happen, Assad seems in more of a hurry to make a deal to regain the Golan Heights from Israel than he was in 1996, when four-plus years of talks abruptly broke off. "He wants to turn to a new page in Syrian history," says a former Assad adviser. "He wants Bashar to have a fresh start."

An encouraging sign is that Assad, whose country remains on the State Department's list of terrorist states, is promoting his son as the sort of Syrian leader with whom the world, Israel included, will be able to do business. Bashar talks the language of economics rather than politics, and, until his brother's death, had chosen a career in ophthalmology rather than following his father's path into the army and power.

Dr. Bashar, as ordinary Syrians are calling him, or "The Hope," in official usage, is single but has a girlfriend. He is courteous, somewhat shy in public, but fluent in English and a lunchtime regular at Damascus' posh Club d'Orient. Though he was recently promoted to colonel in the Syrian military, the svelte heir apparent favors powder blue suits over camouflage fatigues. Bashar has taken charge of policy in Lebanon and spearheaded an anticorruption drive, but he is best known on the street as chairman of the Syrian Informatique Society, which is striving to wire isolated Syria to the Internet. He dispenses with the nationalistic swagger of his father's generation, and has been heard reflecting somberly on Syria's fears, his hopes for change, the impatience of youth and prospects for negotiating with Israel. For a son of Syria's strongman, feared and respected for ruthlessness and cunning, he has a surprisingly touchy-feely side. "Where are we?" he replied when questioned by a Saudi magazine recently about his feelings toward the new millennium. "Did we fail? Where are we heading?"