Appointment in Damascus

By JOE KLEIN

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."

Unfortunately, Assad seems unable to make them. In our interview, he evaded the question of closing Palestinian "rejectionist" group offices in Damascus. "If you're an American and I don't want you here, should I send you to Africa or to the U.S., your country? ...

That's what I told [Assistant Secretary of State William] Burns: Where should I send [the Palestinian radicals]? To the Mediterranean, on a boat?" But he also claimed there were no Palestinian extremist offices in Damascus. "They have houses. They live in the houses, meet with people in the houses. That's what they call offices ... They don't have members in Syria; all their members are in Palestine. The only thing they used to do was call in the media to express their position."

Assad was also firmly evasive about cooperating with the U.S. in rounding up Iraqis supporting the insurgency from Syrian territory.

In January the U.S. had given Assad a list of 34 wanted men assumed to be in Syria. "Many of these names we don't know," Assad told me.

"What does his face look like? What's his real name? Maybe he's using a fake name or a fake passport. You should give us precise information because we can't find them."

This turned out to be a creatively incomplete answer. A few hours earlier, the Iraqis had announced that Saddam's half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti had been captured in Syria, reportedly with the cooperation of Syrian authorities. Unaware of the Iraqi announcement during the interview, I later tried--unsuccessfully--to get a response from the President. The Syrian Information Ministry denied the Iraqi account, but a prominent Syrian official told me that al-Hassan was "personally responsible for the killing of thousands of Syrians during the 1980s, when he was associated with Iraqi intelligence. He was found hiding with a tribe near the Iraqi border and expelled from Syria. He was arrested in Iraq by Iraqis."

Perhaps. But why the elaborate public gymnastics by the Syrian government to avoid the appearance of cooperation with the U.S.? A succession of Syrians offered me the same explanation: Assad--or perhaps the necklace of security and Baath Party officials who surround Assad--didn't want to appear to be caving to U.S. pressure.

"The only way for Bashar to show strength now," said a close associate of the President, "is to be extremely decisive. Leave Lebanon. Reform our government. It's time for leadership."

Enlightened leadership seemed a possibility when Bashar Assad inherited office in 2000. He promised a more open society. He brought intellectuals and free-market economists into the government, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the Baathist old guard. Soon the multiple, overlapping Syrian police and intelligence agencies--a Byzantine web that entangles both Syria and Lebanon--seemed to regain control of the President as well. Dozens of "Damascus Spring" democracy advocates were tossed in jail. "Reform is not like pushing a button," Assad told me. "When there's trouble externally, it will affect Syria ... If you don't have peace, you have to spend most of your money on the army and security issues. All these factors won't make reform fast. It will definitely be slow. We are living under tension ... You can't have reform under tension."

But it isn't easy to repeal the promise of freedom, especially in a country where satellite dishes sprout from almost every rooftop.

People speak more openly in Syria than they have in the past. The President's allies are candid, if not yet quotable, about their disappointment in him. Yet even Assad's reform-minded opponents seem to believe that he remains the best hope for change. "I am a doctor," said Kamal Labwani, a Damascus Spring activist recently released from jail. "The President is a doctor. Does he think we'll be able to live like this another 40 years? I don't think so."

Labwani wanted me to ask Assad why he had been imprisoned. "I didn't throw him in jail," Assad told me. "I don't do everything in this country." It was an admission his father never would have made. The President's body language was more ophthalmologist than dictator. He sat hunched deep in a black leather couch. There was no physical sense of power or menace to the man, no sociopathic cool, just consternation. When I asked him who killed Rafiq Hariri, he seemed stricken: "The most important question is, Who had the benefit of it?

As President, I can't tell you this country or that. But who suffered most from it? Syria. Syria was the biggest loser. The Lebanese, definitely, they lost ... But Syria lost more." And later, as he was escorting me to the door, he said, "Please send this message: I am not Saddam Hussein. I want to cooperate." The plea was at least partly believable. Obviously, he is not Saddam Hussein. It was also plausible that he wants to cooperate. It just didn't seem very likely that he could.

--With reporting by George Baghdadi/ Damascus