So the Lion of Damascus is, at last, no more. For some people, he has been an unconscionable time dying. I remember when, back in 1983, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his loyalist guerrillas were fighting a desperate rearguard action against the Syrian Army in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli. Arafat leaned over his desk and whispered conspiratorially that salvation was at hand: "The monster is dead," he said. He had just heard it from what he thought was an impeccable source. Stricken with leukemia, Syrian President Hafez Assad apparently did indeed approach death that time, and on at least one occasion since. But in the end, of the now rapidly diminishing gallery of aging Middle East autocrats, three were to go in quick succession before he did.

Assad was absolute master of Syria for 30 years and one of its strongmen for several years longer than that; his death, so very inopportunely timed, is liable to be fraught with much greater consequences, both immediate and long-term, than that of King Hussein of Jordan, King Hassan of Morocco or Sheikh Khalifa of Bahrain. These will be first of all domestic. But, given Syria's position at the heart of the Middle East power system, they will become regional and international as well. One thinks first of Lebanon, under Syrian tutelage since 1990, and then of the Middle East peace process, of which the Syrian-Israeli agreement was to be the arch of the temple.

Assad's was a one-man rule "par excellence," and he died without properly preparing for an heir to step into his shoes. A survival from the era of totalitarian systems, one that bucked the worldwide trend of democratization and "people power," his regime was held together by a combination of long-accumulated personal authority and prestige on the one hand and a military-cum-party oligarchy completely beholden to him on the other.