The last Baathist State unveiled: respected Middle East specialist George Joffe comments on a timely new book on Syria. (The Last Word).

This is a very timely book, published just as the war against Iraq is ending and American anger is being redirected against its neighbour, Syria, now the world's last remaining Baathist state. It is also an excellent study, not only of the phenomenon of Baathism but also of the operations of the corporatist, authoritarian state that America claims it wishes to eliminate from the Middle Eastern region.

Finally, it benefits immeasurably from the fact that it is not simply an academic analysis but reflects the author's long journalistic experience of the country and his many personal contacts, both within the Assad regime and in wider Syrian society. This is, in short, an essential and surprisingly accessible study, which encapsulates what is wrong in the Middle East today through an examination of one of its leading countries.

The primary purpose of Alan George's study is to document the short history of the 'Damascus Spring', an exhilarating six-months following Bashar Assad's mid-2000 succession as President during which a civil society movement gained momentum before being crushed with the arrests and subsequent imprisonment of several of its leading lights including the veteran communist leader Riad Al Turk and MPs Riad Seif and Ma'moun Al Homsi. The movement had developed on the premise that the new Syrian leader was anxious to liberalise the state because he realised that economic regeneration would require concomitant political liberalisation. It was crushed because, in the end, the new president was reluctant to face down the old-guard establishment inside the Baath Party that he had inherited from his father and also because the new leader preferred to prioritise economic reform.

Yet, as Hafiz Assad himself once remarked, 'Man does not live on bread alone ... He needs freedom and dignity'--a quotation that provides a sub-text to Alan George's analysis. The reality is that the political structures of Syria are so undermined by the stagnation, not to speak of the brutalisation of society arising from three decades of Baathist rule, that neither can be effectively achieved without profound political change, as the civil society movement well understood. Short-term economic change may be achieved, as the advisers to President Assad believe, assisted by the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership but, in the end, the hard political choices cannot be avoided.

Alan George demonstrates this by a penetrating description of contemporary Syrian society and political life, backed up by personal observation and comment from Syrians themselves, set in the context of the history of the Baath Party there. It makes a depressing read, from the 1963 Revolution to the Corrective Movement of the early 1970s and on to the unconvincing reforms at the start of the new century. On the way Syria's complex religious and ethnic mix obtrudes, as do the more spectacular acts of repression by the regime, including the crushing of the Hama rebellion in 1982, and the consequent 'memory-holes'--for, as George points out, the true precursor of the Assad regime is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. 'Which is the way to the Great Mosque?', the author asks a passer-by in Hama. 'There's no such mosque here', is the reply--even though the author had visited it many years before.

Yet, in the end, regimes cannot change reality, and that is the dilemma that faces Bashar Al Assad.

Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom, by Alan George, Zed Books, London and New York, 206 pages including index, appendices, map, chronology and economic data. 13.95 [pounds sterling].