But in a stunning display of the regime’s vulnerability, the Syrian President has aborted the visit. Assad was terrified that he might be indicted while in New York off the back of the inquiry into the Hariri killing conducted by the chief UN investigator, Detlev Mehlis. The dour but dogged German had already fingered four pro-Syrian Lebanese security officials and is now — with the help of the French and other secret services — following the powder trail all the way back to Damascus. This is likely to bring him very close to Assad himself.

There was a second, connected reason for Assad’s unwillingness to travel at this time: fear of a coup. Some Baathist old stagers are desperately unhappy with his ineptitude. First, overplaying his hand in Lebanon and effectively getting caught — in political terms if not in policing terms — and then being forced to overcompensate by agreeing belatedly to admit UN investigators into Syria.

Some regime figures even worry that a single cruise missile attack — say, on the secret police headquarters — could topple the regime by proving its inability to protect Syrian sovereignty. To stave off such an eventuality, the Baathists have been trying to send out emollient signals: advertising loudly the gun battle between security forces and Muslim radicals in Hama (the old Baathist game of presenting themselves to the West as the only alternative to a theocracy and a useful ally against fundamentalist terror); and, following meetings with Hezbollah representatives, indicating that they urged Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, to hint that he might contemplate disarmament.

At the same time, the Baathists have played the part of the victim of circumstance: when the Americans have demanded that they take action against the godfathers of the Iraqi insurgency, regime spokesmen claim that they lack the wherewithal to do much about them without being given addresses. It also says it needs sophisticated night-fighting equipment to interdict the terrorists.

The Syrians will, of course, not be receiving any such technology. Neither country now has an ambassador in each other’s capital and Baathist officials are already subject to sanctions under the Syria Accountability Act. Following US pressure, the Turks declined to give Assad and his family permission to holiday there. And Jacques Chirac, who took the killing of his friend Hariri so personally, still behaves, in the words of a senior diplomat, “as though he is desk officer for Lebanon at the Quai d’Orsay”.

But will this unique window of Syrian vulnerability be exploited? The Americans certainly want “behaviour change”, and would shed no tears if Assad fell. The Jordanians and Saudis might not be too unhappy, either: these Sunni monarchies are increasingly fearful of a radical Shia bloc stretching from Iran, into Iraq and thence into Syria — the real “clash of civilisations” in the Middle East. If the Assad clan — part of the Alawite sect from the broader world of Shiaism — was toppled by representatives of Syria’s Sunni majority, then those American allies might feel less exposed.

But after their experience in Iraq, the Americans are in no mood to effect regime change by themselves. That said, they are not looking hard for a “Syrian Gorbachev” from within the regime. The back channel that some Syrians have cultivated via Edward Djerejian — a former senior US diplomat who heads the Baker Institute in Houston and advises Karen Hughes, the public diplomacy chief at the State Department — has so far borne little fruit.

Instead, the Administration seems likely to pursue a middle way between neo-conservative interventionism and the “realism” of career Arabists at the State Department. It also now feels it needs to know more about alternatives to the Baath regime: that is why Michael Doran, senior director on the National Security Council staff for the Near East, recently met Farid Ghadry, a foremost dissident and leader of the Reform Party of Syria.

Ghadry is proposing to set up a provisional parliament-in-exile to negotiate a “Bremer-less” transition out of Baathism. He is anxious not to repeat what many think to be the errors of Iraq, namely backing a ruling minority into a corner: he would allow the Alawites to remain in the armed forces pending a new democratic constitution.

The fate of Syria may yet be determined by unrelated events. Even before Hurricane Katrina, Washington could not focus on Syria because it was so riveted by events in Iraq. With the Administration’s attention now firmly on New Orleans, one cannot but recall Lyndon Johnson’s famous remark about Gerald Ford — that “he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time”. Even the most “secularist” of Baathists would surely have to thank Allah for such deliverance.

Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange

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