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Syria: The Lost Bequest of Hafez Assad

(Newsweek) Fouad Ajami - Arabs are firm believers in nasab, inherited merit passed on from father to son, a nobility of the blood. Bashar, son of Hafez Assad, has a son named Hafez. But Bashar needn't worry about training his son for future rulership. The house that Hafez Assad built, some four decades ago, is not destined to last. The country's first coup d'etat had come in 1949, a mere three years after independence, and the conspiracies would not cease in the years to come. In this republic of conspirators and coup makers, Hafez Assad was to emerge as the supreme practitioner of the art. There were three Baathist coups - in 1963, 1966, and 1970. He was a minor player in the first, a partner in the second, and the victor in the third against his own erstwhile allies. Assad could never surmount the blame that the Golan Heights were lost to Israel in the Six-Day War on his watch, when he was defense minister. Unable to recover the Golan, he did the next best thing: he all but came into possession of Lebanon. The writer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
2012-01-25 00:00:00
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