The Bashar Assad I Know

The Bashar Assad I Know

As I noted in Middle East Policy Council a couple of years back, I half jokingly told Bashar the first time we met in 2004 that I thought he had made a mistake in letting the media know that he enjoyed Phil Collins’ music. This anecdote fed into an emerging narrative of the relatively unknown al-Assad that he was a pro-West modernizer who was very different from his father. Indeed, Bashar was also the chairman of the Syrian Computer Society and was actually a bit of a geek himself.

Maybe Bashar is partially to blame for these increased expectations, dedicating himself as he did to the Damascus spring, which saw a period of unprecedented political openness. However, this was soon followed by political repression, and the misplaced profiling of the Syrian president in the West clearly missed the point.

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