IN AUTOMOBILES AND OTHER WAYS, Damascus, like Havana, can look like the city the world forgot. It is arguably the oldest living settlement in the world, inhabited for almost 10,000 years, yet now best known as a capital of tyranny, headquarters of a military regime isolated by international opprobrium and feared by its own people. Syria is your friendly neighborhood thug, its government a milder variant of the same Baath Party (secular, socialist, and sadistic) that held Saddam's Iraq in its grip. With the latter regime deposed, Syria has taken over the role of rogue state: accused of "support for terrorism," "false statements," and "interference in the affairs of its neighbors" (Condoleezza Rice); "helper and enabler" of terrorists (George W. Bush); "one of the major supporters of terrorism" (the Pentagon).

Axis of evil, junior division. But if Syria's government has been cast as the black hat in international affairs, the Syrians themselves make the sweetest of villains. The population of 18 million is about 70 percent Sunni Muslim but is controlled by the Alawites, a small Shiite offshoot—comprising roughly 12 percent of Syrians, including the Assad family—that deifies Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Fearful of the Sunni majority, the Alawites keep a lock on military and security posts, and defend their secular regime tooth and nail: When dictator Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, after a nearly 30-year rule of defeat and stagnation, the constitution was literally rewritten overnight to elevate his 34-year-old son Bashar. Things began to look up when Assad the younger, an ophthalmologist trained in England, took over. Cell phones were made legal, then satellite dishes, which now crowd the skyline of the capital, challenging the monopoly on information. Tourism has grown 5 percent a year, with Europeans and even American Christians drawn to a breathtaking stockpile of Greco-Roman–Byzantine–Crusader ruins, religious shrines, and social graces drawn from the golden age of Islamic civilization.

A shopping arcade in Damascus's Souk al-Hamidiyeh. (Seamus Murphy)

But the pleasures of Syria (uncountable historical treasures, sympathetic people, sublime food) come with drawbacks (blistering deserts, Mad Max roads, a murderous police state). Bashar's sham election earned him 92.79 percent of the vote, security forces killed at least two dozen Kurdish demonstrators in March 2004, and you can still find the leader of the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise-ship hijacking in the Damascus phone book. A year ago, the Syrian government dramatically enhanced its reputation for stupidity by allegedly sponsoring the assassination of Hariri, one of its sharpest critics. The massive car bomb that killed the former prime minister backfired: Street protests erupted throughout Lebanon, Muslims and Christians marching together in what became known as the Cedar Revolution. By last April the demonstrations had forced out the 20,000 Syrian troops that had occupied Lebanon since 1976. Humiliated, the last Baathist army of conquest retreated to Damascus.

Confused, defensive, under investigation, the Syrian government began to look shaky. Days before my arrival last fall, The New York Times advised that the "veneer of normalcy" could crack at any moment. Most fatefully for its future, Syria has become a kind of small-scale Cambodia to Iraq's Vietnam, a transit route and sanctuary for the insurgency next door. The foreign jihadis who slip over the 376-mile border are only a tiny minority in Iraq, but they have drawn Washington's wrath onto Damascus. In October, a White House meeting mapped a range of options for punishing Syria. Increased economic sanctions. Delta Force missions. Or simply the continued initiative to keep Bashar off balance—"rattling the cage." In November, The Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered CentCom, the U.S. Central Command, to prepare a "strategic concept" for Syria, the precursor to a war plan.

Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. Like Cuba in 1957, this twilight shall not come again. And so, to the tune of the saber rattling, I went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.