Robert Satloff of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has just published a subscription-only article — "Sin of Omission" — in The New Republic about Syrian President Bashar al Assad's recent address at the Baath Party Congress.
If you aren't a subscriber to The New Republic, then you can read the full article on the institute's website.
According to Satloff, it seems that Assad's strategy in this time of trouble for Syria is to do nothing:
On Monday, Assad delivered the keynote address to the tenth meeting of Syria's Baath Party Congress. This was just the second time his ruling party had met in the five years since he succeeded his late father. During those years, expectations have frequently run high that Bashar was a closet reformer, the man who would drag Syria from its closed, proto-Stalinist past into an era of Arab glasnost and perestroika. Assad, however, has always failed to deliver, and Syria's politics and economy have remained stagnant.But more puzzling than Assad's missed opportunities to reform have been his strategic mistakes. Whereas his father, Hafez, mesmerized American presidents with his cunning, guile, and tenacity, Bashar's equivocation on Iraq, support for Hezbollah and Palestinian terror groups, and barely visible aid in the battle against Al Qaeda have earned only contempt from the White House's current inhabitant. Recently, Assad's blunders have seemed to intensify. In a truly stunning display of diplomatic ineptitude, Assad strong-armed Lebanon to accept a second term for a quisling president and, by all accounts, arranged the daylight assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al Hariri. This had the result of reviving U.S.-French relations from their Iraq-war nadir by giving the two counties a common purpose: evicting Syria from Lebanon. In the months that followed, Assad brought ignominy to his army, which was compelled--without a single bullet being fired--to beat a hasty retreat from a country it had dominated for a generation. He also triggered the expulsion of probably a quarter-million or more Syrian workers from Lebanon--nobody knows for sure how many--which swelled the ranks of Syria's unemployed overnight. To paraphrase the courageous Syrian reformer Ammar Abdulhamid, if the Assads were the modern-day Corleones, Hafez dreamed of having Michael succeed him but was stuck with Fredo.
This week's Baath Party Congress was supposed to give Bashar the opportunity to make a fresh start. Rumors were rampant that the young leader would finally announce real change. By various accounts, this was to include the sacking of his father's old-guard cronies, the suspension of suffocating emergency laws (in place since 1963), the release of all political prisoners, an end to state monopolies and other restraints on free enterprise, and perhaps even the repeal of an infamous article in the Syrian constitution that enshrines the Baath Party as vanguard of the nation and repository of all political power.
But Assad, a world-class underachiever, fooled us again. He announced no personnel changes, no legislative initiatives, no prison releases, no economic stimulus packages, no constitutional reforms. He didn't mention Iraq or Israel or Palestine or Lebanon or America. He did nothing.
Well, not quite. This man of the twenty-first century--an ophthalmologist by training and one-time head of the Syria Computer Society--did focus his venom on a particularly pernicious enemy of the Syrian people: globalization. He attacked the "information-technology revolution," which he said is leading to the "cultural, political, and moral collapse of the Arab individual and his ultimate defeat even without a fight." Assad's prescription: "As members of the Baath Party, we should first of all redouble our intellectual efforts and political and cultural effectiveness in order to strengthen our national existence, and protect our cultural identity. ... The Baath Party, as should be clear to every one of us, is a cause before it is a political organization, and a civilizing mission before it is a party in power."
So there it was: Assad's answer to calls for reform was not less Baathism, but more. In offering a ringing defense of an ideology whose only other champion these days is a jailed Saddam Hussein, Assad once again showed that his regime is one in whose survival the United States--and the West, more generally--simply has no interest.
All of this leads Satloff to conclude that Assad's days might be numbered.
You might compare Satloff's essay with this AFP story on Assad's speech.