DAMASCUS -- In the portrait hanging in Damascus airport´s dusty lost- and-found office, President Bashar Assad looks baleful and uncertain -- as though the younger son of a much-feared father is still searching for his role as a ruler of an Arab state in desperate need of reform.

Five years ago, when the President assumed power after Hafez Assad´s death, the worst fear was that Syria would be seized by a violent power struggle.

The brightest hope was that the young ophthalmologist with a modest demeanour and some exposure to the West could smoothly transform the nation into a modern, market-driving democracy.

Neither has been realized, and the high hopes have ebbed. Rife with corruption, Syria stumbles along -- surrounded by a rapidly changing Middle East, mired in its own messy contradictions, increasingly isolated. And Mr. Assad seems to rule by caution, not boldness.

"He´s the least worst dictator in the Arab world," is the cynical but not entirely negative view of one Syrian intellectual, as well as several sympathetic foreign observers living in Damascus.

Mr. Assad, 39, remains broadly popular among ordinary Syrians, most of whom have known no other rule than that of Assad the elder and younger. But there is also a growing sense of impatience, as little has changed for the better since Hafez Assad´s death.

The President keeps promising that reform is just around the corner, but some are unconvinced: "The real opposition is the majority of the Syrian people," said an intellectual whose memories of his prison term -- a long one -- have made him reluctant to have his name published. "But they are afraid to speak out, and they have no rights. They live in a sea of fear."

Next month´s Baath Party congress will see the unveiling -- or so it is promised -- of sweeping political and economic change. The hope is that it will include free, unfettered political parties -- not the tame, subservient and tightly controlled "opposition" that has been allowed until now. Laws providing foreign investors with genuine forms of redress when things go wrong would be welcome, along with private banks not tethered to the government.

"There´s a lot of talk about reform," says a Syrian inclined to give Mr. Assad the benefit of the doubt at least one more time. "He has built up expectations, and there could be a wave of disappointment if he fails to deliver."

That kind of sympathetic assessment blames the clannish military and governmental elites installed by Hafez Assad for thwarting or at least slowing his son´s inclination to reform.

Seen from this perspective, Bashar Assad achieved something of a breakthrough by ordering Syria´s military and secret police out of Lebanon last month, satisfying international demands and facing down the old guard with one bold stroke. In the view of Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and State Department official, it was the kind of defining moment that may turn the cub into another Lion of Damascus, as his father was known.

"Bashar, not quite five years into his presidency, I don´t think has gone through those kinds of defining challenges," said Mr. Leverett, author of the just-published Inheriting Syria: Bashar´s Trial by Fire.

"I think he is going through one now. And how he handles that defining crisis will, I think, say a lot about his future as a national leader . . . . It´s a critical moment in terms of Syria´s strategic situation."

But retreat from Lebanon as the first step toward bold change strikes others as unlikely.

Syria remains an authoritarian state in which both the levers of power and the sources of wealth are controlled by a small circle.

Despite persistent efforts to portray Mr. Assad as modest, self- effacing and thoroughly modern, Damascus is still a place where thugs in bad suits packing scarcely concealed handguns hold parking spots outside trendy restaurants for the President´s cronies.

If, as is alleged, he really chides his friends for their excessive use of chauffeurs, it has had little effect. Like the President´s professed dislike for seeing his portrait on every building and shop front, it is an endearing notion that seems universally disregarded. In reality, grey and uninspiring portraits of the thin, mustachioed President are ubiquitous, alongside portraits of his father. The elder Assad is almost always portrayed in the prime of life rather than as an elderly man, with the disconcerting result that the two look like brothers.

The view of the President as impatient reformer is too simple.

Syria looked to the Soviet Union for decades and the dark shadows of centralized state control remain.

Even Syrians who admire what Mr. Assad has achieved and remain certain that more reform is in the offing acknowledge the size and difficulty of his challenge.

"We had been under the influence of the Soviet Union for so long, it is not so easy to get out of it," said Rateb Shallah, head of the Syrian Chamber of Commerce and a leading establishment business figure. "We have a civil service based on loyalty rather than efficiency, [and] a certain amount of corruption."

What remains unclear is whether President Assad is willing to root out corruption, whose sticky vines clearly climb high into the ruling elites that include his friends and extended family. And time may be running out.

Pressure for change is building inside the country, not least from the professional and middle classes whose standard of living has steadily declined over the last decade.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Bush administration shows no signs of letting up on its pressure on Damascus -- although it has made no mention of seeking regime change. (© 2005 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. 05/12/05)