Bashar's Syria: The Regime and its Strategic Worldview Shmuel Bar ...

Bashar’s Syria 371a major cause for disaffection, he focused on anticorruption campaigns and opening thedoor to constructive criticism of the shortcomings of the regime bureaucracy.All these steps were accompanied by a sweeping rejuvenation of the military, security,and party apparatuses and steps to guarantee the satisfaction of the bureaucracy. 45 The“stability,” or stagnancy, of the military and security apparatuses came to an end evenbefore Hafez al-Asad’s death. Some of the old guard were not favorably disposed towardsthe president’s plans for crowning his son, either out of principle, personal ambition or dueto strained relations with Bashar or some of his confidantes. Hafez al-Asad began movingsome of these figures aside even before his death. The fact that many of them were alreadyseptuagenarians facilitated this process. Since Bashar came to power, this natural flow hasbeen renewed, though the top echelons of the military are still older than their counterpartsin other components of the regime and none are from Bashar’s own generation. 46 Thispolicy created instability in key cardinal pillars the regime.Since Bashar took power, the majority (over sixty percent) of the officials of the regime,party, and local government and members of Parliament had been replaced by youngerfigures. This was implemented primarily through imposed retirement of officials over theage of sixty. This turnover stood in stark contrast to the three decades of stagnant stabilityunder Hafez al-Asad. This process was particularly evident in the Ba’th party, where themajority of representatives to the Tenth Party Congress were new faces.Bashar’s detractors, however, point out that these changes were aimed more at appointingpeople who would owe their positions to Bashar than at facilitating real reform byrejuvenation of the regime. The new appointees were not people from outside the ancienrégime, but younger members of the regime who had had climbed the ladders of the hierarchybut been blocked by the lack of mobility at the top. Bashar also projected a genuinedesire for governmental reform. Unlike his father, who saw the economy as secondary tonational political goals, Bashar subscribes to an “economo-centric” view of politics. Herecognizes the priority of modernizing Syria’s economy and is aware that to do so he mustgain the goodwill of the West. This entails creating a functional bureaucracy to replace ofthe feudal system that thrived under his father. It also is notable that Bashar actually “inherited”the modernization and anticorruption agenda from his late brother Basil, who hadalso promoted it when he had been “heir apparent” and had recycled methods used by theirfather to crack down on Rifa’t al-Asad in the early 1980s. The campaign was engineered tostrengthen Bashar’s public standing by identifying him with a populist issue, but at no stagein his prepresidential career nor since he has become president has he risked confrontationwith the inner circle of the regime in order to fight corruption. Those who were accusedof corruption were no more nor less corrupt than others whose status in the regime haveprecluded action against them (such as ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam, Ghazi Kana’an, Maheral-Asad, Asef Shawkat and others).Bashar has also gone on record formally as supporting a “democratization process”in Syria and frequently has mentioned 2007 elections as key to the next major stage inthis process. Bashar’s accession therefore raised expectations both inside Syria and in theinternational community for a “white revolution” of democratization and liberalization inthe country. Once the intelligentsia felt that there was a chink in the ideological uniformityof the regime and that the regime had lost its will, undercurrents of diversity came to thefore. This gave birth to what was popularly known as the “Damascus Spring” of 2001—an outburst of the hitherto suppressed intellectual and civil-society circles, particularly inDamascus, and the founding of a large number of “clubs” for political debate.However, there are indications that Bashar’s concept of “Syrian democracy” lacksmany of the essential elements of the Western paradigm of democracy. Bashar’s “Syrian