"The regime is doing anything it can to stay as long as it can" in Lebanon, said Ammar Abdel Hamid, a Syrian dissident.

Damacus has moved enough to give itself some wiggle room, but its military pullout is now being accompanied by a political bear hug.

Analysts here point out that the reaffirmed protocols of the ominously named Syrian-Lebanese Treaty of Fraternity and Cooperation Tuesday between Assad and Lahoud welded together the larger state and its vassal in formal bonds that might make separating even harder in the future.

Committees such as the "Joint Defense and Security," the "Military and Security" as well as the "Technical Committee" and even the two countries' customs systems make real Lebanese independence a farce, say analysts here.

Syria has invested too many billions of dollars to give up on Lebanon, said a Western diplomat based here. "So it's playing poker whereas the rest of the world is playing chess," he said.

But that game, in which an increasingly media-savvy Syria offers journalists increasing access to views of departing troops, but maintains influence, will no longer be tolerated in the West, said the diplomat.

Meantime, Syrian investors are increasingly pulling funds from Beirut banks and the regime sees that money gushing out to foreign banks outside Syria. In Damascus it is said that about $10 billion have been yanked from Lebanese accounts to be squirreled away elsewhere.

The state's spin doctors continue to grind out a meal of "business as usual," offering up a diet of evidence that Bashar Assad's regime is far more benign than his father's. Indeed, even
Syria's opposition credits the 39-year-old leader with opening the country up to Internet and cell-phone coverage – allowing those who don't parrot government talk the chance to communicate and read about the rest of the world.

Government spokesmen insist "the president is just as popular as ever. This will not change anything, it will just soften the blow for the regime."

Abdel Hamid noted that Syria might now work to frighten Lebanon into submission by raising the specter of a rising Hizbullah. "Syria will ensure that Hizbullah will be a major power-broker, if not the major power-broker, once it leaves," he said.

However, Syria's opposition, said one diplomat here, "cannot organize its way out of a paper bag." In the words of one of its own, Syria's opposition leader Yassin Haj Saleh, "We are weak, we are feeble, but we must keep on."

The Syrian government has long since clamped down on all opposition parties allowing one "discussion forum" to survive. The relic, called the Atasi Forum after a former leading government minister, meets once a month. Its attendance is graced by as many Mukhabarat agents as luminaries, intellectuals and pseudo-radicals, joke its members.

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