We use cookies to help better serve your experience. Accept Cookies. Whether the subject is Bush or Rummy, Santorum or Abbas , portraits are often the most interesting political images to deconstruct. President Assad wore a black suit and a charcoal shirt without a tie; Mrs.
Assad, a sea-foam green sweater over a sheer top and a white skirt. Her long, honey-colored hair was uncovered.
Together they made a kind of visual rhyme with the building: tall, slender and young, they seemed the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion, the elegant doctor-turned-president out on the town with his dazzling British-born Syrian wife, the former J. Morgan banker whom Syrians call their Princess Diana. Once outside the hall, the couple stopped to shake hands and chat. Some held high their cellular telephones โ legalized by Assad only three years ago โ to snap digital photographs. However, Basil was killed in a car accident in so Bashar was yanked home from London where he was pursuing his training as an opthamologist.
He was placed in the army, and then began his elevation. As the article progresses however, Bennet begins to paints a rather, well, enigmatic picture. As he interviews Assad, as well as various proponents, dissidents and international academics, Assad seems to become less and less understandable.
Is Bashar just a young and inexperienced figure that many academics nonetheless are coming to observe as leadership material trying to protect a secular agenda in a region being pulled apart by sectarian forces? Is Assad actually an adept but cautious progressive who โ having just recently consolidated his power at the Baath Party Congress โ now intends to create an Arab-style democracy with a free-market economy?
