Damascus
THURSDAY AFTERNOON is the start of the weekend here, but the Christian Quarter of the Old City, home to most of Damascus's liveliest bars, restaurants, and cafés, seems strangely subdued.

"People are scared and angry," says D, a 22-year-old student and journalist from Syrian television with whom I'm spending the day, walking around and speaking with ordinary Syrians whose most palpable fear right now is of what they believe is an imminent U.S. attack.

"We'll fight the Americans," says T, a 25-year-old businessman whose presence in this trendy café suggests that he probably will not fight but may have enough money to finance some fighting. "I'm a Christian," he says, "but it doesn't matter--Christian, Muslim--we're all Syrians, and we'll fight as Syrians."

During my last trip to Damascus, in the winter, I was surprised to find Syrians who believed that they might be better off if the Assad regime fell. I am less surprised now to see how that enthusiasm has been tempered. It's not that President Bashar al-Assad has finally won the hearts and minds of his people; rather, many Syrians see the sectarian violence in Iraq, and they are fearful the same might happen here.

T may say he's ready for the Americans, but I wonder if he isn't more concerned about having to fight other Syrians, especially the country's overwhelmingly Sunni Arab majority. There's a reason the ruling Alawites have cloaked themselves in Arab nationalism--it disguises the fact that a minority sect some Sunnis consider heretical is running the country. But D, like virtually all Syrians, is very sensitive about anything touching on the country's confessional issues, so she won't let me ask T, and we move along.

D is an Alawite whose father used to hold a high diplomatic post under Hafez al-Assad. By all accounts, Bashar's father did a much better job of spreading not only the regime's wealth and power among other sects, especially the Sunnis, but also its culpability. Right now Syria's ruling class--Bashar, his brother Maher, and brother-in-law Assef Shawkat--can fit on the head of a pin. And with the U.N. report on the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri due to be released October 25, it's hard to see how the family can entirely escape a day of reckoning.

How is Syria coping with the pressure? The way it always has, with violence. Last week, a popular Lebanese television journalist was maimed and nearly killed in a car bombing, the latest in a string of assassinations and explosions for which the Syrians and their Lebanese cut-outs are commonly thought responsible. Since Hariri's death, all of the violence has been directed against Christian individuals or Christian areas in a transparent attempt to provoke sectarian fighting. It is worthwhile to note that a state fearful of sectarian conflict runs a regional policy in Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel that aims to provoke elsewhere its own worst nightmares at home.

Still, many Arab officials and Western analysts continue to believe that Washington should find some way to engage Assad. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for instance, may truly fear the fallout of a collapse in Damascus, but what's even more terrifying to him and other Arab leaders is that if Bashar falls, the Bush administration might think it's on a hot streak. Who knows where the finger will point next? As for the Western analysts who want Bush to warm up to Syria, some are legitimately concerned about the possible fate of Syrian minorities, while others counsel engagement merely out of habit.