Word: bashar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...travel time with animated discussions about global hot spots from Chechnya to China. When a local New Hampshire pol asked him a question about Lebanon last month, he unfurled a lengthy answer that included a consideration of whether Syrian President Hafez Assad will be succeeded by his son Bashar or his brother Rifaat. While McCain swipes at Bush's reliance on foreign-policy gurus--"When there is a crisis," he says, "I won't have to consult advisers"--he talks shop with many members of the foreign-policy firmament, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Brzezinski. In those...
...Both sides have the will to resolve this problem," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "(Syrian President) Hafez Assad is concerned to negotiate Syria's recovery of the Golan because he doesn't want to leave his son and appointed successor, Bashar, facing this complex problem. For the Israelis, a deal with Syria would put Israel at peace with all of its immediate neighbors." It may be some time, though, before the two sides reward President Clinton with a triumphant photo opportunity. "The talks will be hard because both sides are tough negotiators," says Dowell. "There's unlikely...
...since Israel was founded 51 years ago. That may not be the way it looks from Washington, where officials are struggling to get the two sides just to sit down together. Yet inside Syria, Assad, 69, ailing with heart disease, diabetes and prostate problems, appears increasingly anxious to ensure Bashar's position and with it the Assad legacy. And to make that happen, Assad seems in more of a hurry to make a deal to regain the Golan Heights from Israel than he was in 1996, when four-plus years of talks abruptly broke off. "He wants to turn...
...encouraging sign is that Assad, whose country remains on the State Department's list of terrorist states, is promoting his son as the sort of Syrian leader with whom the world, Israel included, will be able to do business. Bashar talks the language of economics rather than politics, and, until his brother's death, had chosen a career in ophthalmology rather than following his father's path into the army and power...
...Bashar, as ordinary Syrians are calling him, or "The Hope," in official usage, is single but has a girlfriend. He is courteous, somewhat shy in public, but fluent in English and a lunchtime regular at Damascus' posh Club d'Orient. Though he was recently promoted to colonel in the Syrian military, the svelte heir apparent favors powder blue suits over camouflage fatigues. Bashar has taken charge of policy in Lebanon and spearheaded an anticorruption drive, but he is best known on the street as chairman of the Syrian Informatique Society, which is striving to wire isolated Syria to the Internet...