President Hafez alAssad, master of Syria since 1979, was a towering figure of Arab politics, respected and feared in his own country and throughout the Middle East. His death on June 10th, at the age of 69, marks the end of an era in the region.
His achievements were threefold: he gave Syria years of much-needed, if somewhat repressive, stability; he turned his relatively small country, once the victim of other people's intrigues, into a major regional player whose views could no longer be ignored; and, with patience and dogged consistency, he fought to prevent Israel from imposing its will on the Arab world.
In the end, he came to terms with the fact of Israel's existence, and was persuaded to open negotiations for a permanent peace settlement.
But his dream of containing the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders, and of checking the spread of its regional influence by means of an Arab-Israeli balance of power, was not realised. To that extent, he died a disappointed man.
His long rule was all the more remarkable in that he was not born a Sunni Muslim. His family were Alawites, a heterodox outgrowth of Shi'ism, itself something of an opposition in Islam for the past 1,000 years.
Politics was his life-long interest. As a schoolboy, he joined the pan-Arab socialist Baath party, and rose to be a student leader. He wanted to become a doctor, but his parents could not pay the fees, so he went to the military academy.
He volunteered for the air force and passed out top of his class. He was sent on flying courses to the Soviet Union and to Egypt, and it was in Cairo, with an admiring eye on Gamal Abdul Nasser, the great Arab leader of his day, that he became a conspirator, plotting with a small group of fellow officers, to overthrow the Syrian government, a task accomplished in 1963.
In the next seven years, he clawed his way up the ladder until he emerged as sole leader in 1970.
As a young and inexperienced defence minister in the 1967 war, he presided over the loss of the Golan Heights.
In 1970, he sent tanks into Jordan to help the Palestinians against King Hussein, but had to beat a humiliating retreat when Israel threatened to intervene. In 1973, he secretly planned the October war with Egypt's Anwar al-Sadat, but Israel turned the tables on them both, and by defeating Egypt took it out of the Arab military equation.
When the hard-line Menachem Begin came to power in Israel in 1977, he faced a militant Likud determined to create a "greater Israel". To absorb the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza free from Arab challenge, Begin and his rugged defence minister, Ariel Sharon, conceived the daring plan of bringing Lebanon into Israel's orbit. In 1982, they invaded Lebanon and besieged Beirut, with the aim of booting out both the PLO and the Syrians, and installing a Maronite vassal. Rallying his allies, Assad fought back. Israel's troops were harried by guerrillas and took heavy casualties. Israel's adventure turned into a debacle and a dispirited Begin gave up the struggle. From Syria's point of view, it was Assad's finest hour.
The Arab defeat in the six-day war caused strains in his relationship with the Soviet Union. After 1967 - and again after 1973 - it became obvious that, while the Soviets were prepared to re-arm their Arab proteges, they were reluctant to give them the means to recover their lost territories by force. Moscow was anxious to avoid a confrontation with the United States.
When Gorbachev emerged, anxious to befriend the west, he was quick to grasp that a major prop of his world was gone. With great pragmatism, he corrected his aim and, by 1987, was busy making overtures to Washington.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990, he recognised at once that Iraq's aggression was a serious threat to Syria's interests. He had long detested Saddam, a sentiment that was fully reciprocated. He sensed that if Saddam got away with his seizure of Kuwait, Syria would be his next target.
He joined the American-led coalition and sent troops to help defend Saudi Arabia. But he did not welcome the Gulf War.
He was to suffer a number of setbacks. In September 1993, Israel reached a secret accord with Yasser Arafat's PLO, which put an end to the intifada in the occupied territories - without giving the Palestinians any substantial gains. He denounced the agreement, but declared he would not fight it. A year later, a further blow fell when, in October 1994 and to his dismay, Jordan concluded a peace treaty with Israel.
To his great disappointment, the Clinton administration was to prove one of the most pro-Israeli in American history. At the UN, the Americans protected Israel from international censure over human rights abuses, settlement building in the occupied territories and the confiscation of Arab land in and around East Jerusalem.
Although he started out as a soldier, he rarely wore uniform or harangued the crowd from a balcony. He seemed to shrink from human contact, spending long hours at his desk and living a dull, exemplary life with his wife and children. Money, women or luxuries seemed to have no hold on him. Power was his drug.
The source of his authority over his security chiefs, military commanders and party bosses seemed to lie in his superior intelligence. His favourite instrument of government was the telephone.
With visitors, however, he could exercise considerable charm, and those who knew him intimately reported that he had a sardonic sense of humour and was often shaken by gusts of silent laughter.
Hafez al-Assad: born 1930; died, June 2000