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

Bashar’s Syria 385Figure 2. The Syrian Young Guard.2003). This process was repeated prior to the 10th Congress. Thus, by the end of 2005,the face of the various bodies of the Ba’th party had been fundamentally altered. Thisdrive for rejuvenation is common among many young leaders who have inherited theirfathers’ positions. Kings Abdallah of Jordan and Mohammad of Morocco have taken suchsteps, as had King Hussein when he came to the throne. The motivation behind these stepsalso is common: it is difficult for a leader to take over an authoritarian position whenhis close advisors are people who remember him as a child, or who can draw on theirexperience of decisions that the leader’s omnipotent and omniscient parent had taken insimilar circumstances.Until recently there has been little open discussion within the Syrian Ba’th of formalchanges in ideological axioms or traditional slogans. This derived both from ideologicalconservatism and a sense of the irrelevance of the ideology. Hence, the debate regardingreform focused not on the credo of the party, but on its practical application. Practicalreforms in the party itself have been marginal. They include more freedom in elections onthe local level of the party, instructions (July 2004) to the media to refer to party membersas “Mr.” and not as “Comrade” (rafiq), and so fourth. Open discussion of ideological reformhas increased since Bashar al-Asad came to power, and was particularly explicit during theperiod leading up to the 10th Regional Congress (June 2005). Since then, the demands forreform within the party have died down, or at least are not voiced in official party organs.The “reformist trend” within the Ba’th party is clearly identified with the youngergeneration. However, while most of those who are identified as reformists belong to theyoung guard, not all of those identified as members of the “young guard” are in favor ofreforms. There is no indication that the younger members of the Ba’th nomenklatura—theAsad family or the second generation of the original leaders of the regime—favor reformsthat would divest them of their privileges and the economic monopolies they control. Theyoung generation of the military and the mokhabarat also has shown no evidence that theyare in favor of true economic or political reform.