The sometimes unreliable Debka.com, which had the best inside reporting on the Syrian pullout from Lebanon, is now spinning a new tale about developments in Syria:
Assad Launches Secret DeBaathification.
Syrian president Bashar Assad is trying to turn his back on the fiasco of his exit from Lebanon and shore up his regime by a secret crash reform program –- although one that is careful not to put the presidency on the block.
Stage one took place in total hush Saturday, April 9. . . .
Assad wants his epic political and military revolution to be over and done in three months, unlike the Baath revolutions in Iraq and Syria which dragged on through the 1960s and 1970s.
This is a very tall order as well as a dangerous gamble, considering that Assad is proposing to roll back four decades of Syrian history by June and transform his Baath from a Marxist-socialist ideological movement to a rejuvenated, pragmatic ruling party.
Despite the heavy secrecy imposed on this radical program, a storm of opposition will be hard to avoid. It could go as far as a bid for his ouster.
He proposes to sever the reciprocal lifeline between army and party and shut down the movement’s pan-Arab center, so withdrawing the mother party’s support from the many Baath branches around the Arab world, especially in Lebanon and Jordan. He even seeks to rewrite the national constitution and introduce an open market economy.
But since he grasped Lebanon was a write-off, Assad is quoted by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources as dropping to confidants such remarks as: “I don’t want to see foreign troops in Syria forcing us to accept the sort of reforms imposed on Iraq. We can carry out those reforms on our own.” This tone recalls Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi’s vein in 2003 after he was reconciled to meeting the Bush administration’s demands and ceding his nuclear option and weapons of mass destruction programs.
. . .
D. Economy Committee
This panel was assigned to restructure the Syrian economy and oversee its transition to a market economy.
3. A timeline was drawn up for the three critical stages of the Syrian reform program:
April 9 – elections for Baath party branch councils. The plan is to bring fresh blood to the branches to replaces veterans some of whom have been in place 40 years.
April 26 – the newly-elected local branch councils will pick new district bodies.
June – the national party convention will meet to approve the reform program.
The next three months will therefore be crucial for Syria and its ruler.
According to our Middle East sources, Assad’s plan to jettison the old political structures and with them the old guard he inherited from his father exposes him to a fight to the death from such formidable figures as Abdullah al Ahmed, acting general secretary of the Syrian Baath, who took over on Hafez Assad’s death and all three vice presidents Zuheir Masharka, Khalim Haddam and Muhammed Jaber Jabjush. They are all warning Assad that if he goes through with his plan he will be riding for a fall and risk the eclipse of the Assad dynasty in Syria.
Dissent is even broader and deeper among lower Baath echelons and the military officers who treat local Baath branches as their personal power bases.
If this indeed happens (and even if Debka’s reporting is correct, there is considerable uncertainty about the future in such a volatile world), we can once again be treated to public statements in the press that no one could have expected it–except that developments of this general type were part of the Neocon strategy all along. Bringing even a mixed market economy to Syria would be good for almost everyone, except the Socialist ministers themselves.
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