This coldness inspired in Bashar a quiet rebellion against his father’s cult of personality. In his heyday, Hafez staged massive, North Korean–style extravaganzas, with a sea of people flashing cards to make a picture of his face. Crowds would clap wildly whenever the leader’s name was mentioned; Bashar’s tiny gesture of defiance was refusing to join in, because he did not think a man should be applauded without doing something to earn it. He showed other flashes of independence. The Assad children attended exclusive, French-language schools, alongside the sons of the Damascene elite. Though they had people to do their homework for them, in the finest ruling-class tradition, friends of the family say a young Bashar always insisted on doing his own. “He wants to do things his way,” a former adviser says.

Bashar got his chance to prove himself in January 1994, when Basil crashed his Mercedes Benz on his way to the Damascus airport and died. Bashar was called in from London, where he was doing a residency in ophthalmology, to begin a residency in dictatorship. He planned to succeed where his father had failed: at being liked, not just feared. His Syria would be modern and technocratic, a new model for the Middle East. “He wants approval—from the West, from educated Damascenes, from the artists and the intellectual class,” says a Syrian intellectual who asks not to be named. But the boy who grew up without approval did not understand how to earn it. He lacked what the Syrian intellectual calls “the celestial imagination”—the ability to understand the motivations and desires of other people, who might be dreaming of something beyond how much they admire him.

After his return to Damascus, Bashar joined the officer corps and took over the Syrian Computer Society, formerly Basil’s fiefdom. He started working out and learned how to speak without his youthful habit of covering his mouth. He also set out to build a kitchen cabinet of young reformers and technocrats. Bashar’s people were fellow doctors, engineers, college professors: nerds. They wanted Internet access, better technology, and a country with less corruption and more freedom of expression. Abdelnour was now a close adviser and confidant who drew up proposals for “management by objective” and modernizing the regime from within.

When Hafez died in June 2000, a special referendum installed Bashar as president. He had finally forced out his nemesis, Ali Duba, a few months earlier and now pushed other members of the old guard into retirement. On New Year’s Day 2001, Bashar married Asma Al Akhras, an investment banker from an elite Sunni family who had grown up in London. “There was almost a sense that he came to power reluctantly,” says Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official who lived in Syria during Hafez Al Assad’s reign and is now a senior adviser for the Middle East program at the Stimson Center. “He wasn’t Basil, who was the more thuggish, stronger brother. He had this beautiful wife. They struck this picture of what people hoped Syria would become.”