Assad started planning to seize power shortly after the failed Syrian military intervention in the Black September crisis in Jordan.

[4] While Assad had been in de facto command of Syrian politics since 1969, Salah Jadid and his supporters still held all the formal trappings of power.

[5] While many leading middle men were offered posts in Syria's embassies abroad, Jadid refused, telling Assad, "If I ever take power you will be dragged through the streets until you die.

[9] Suspecting sympathisers of the Old Guard as a threat to his power, Hafez al-Assad carried out a purge in 1971, rounding up hundreds of party members and conducted a showtrial against Michel Aflaq, former Syrian President Amin al-Hafiz and numerous Baathists.

Aflaq, Amin and three Baath leaders were sentenced to death via absentia, while ninety-nine party members were imprisoned on accusations of collaboration with the Iraqi Ba'ath.

Leaders of the Old Guard like Aflaq and Amin al-Hafiz had found refuge in Baghdad, following the 1968 Baathist seizure of power in Iraq.

The crux of the new foreign policy adopted by Hafez al-Assad was based on strengthening relations with U.S.S.R, in order to develop Syrian military and economy.

Syria's 1973 constitution re-inforced the "leading role" of the Ba'ath Party in the society and transformed the neo-Baathist revolutionary state into a personalist "Presidential Monarchy" which concentrated all power under the Syrian President.

After attaining undisputed jurisdiction in the military, party and bureaucracy; Assad strengthened his grip by assigning cadres of Alawite loyalists to key posts of various state institutions.

[18] However, Assad and his supporters hit back, stating that because of the "Corrective Movement under the leadership of the warrior Hafez al-Assad", the principles of economic and political pluralism, which had been introduced "some two decades" beforehand, safeguarded the Syrian government from the possibility of collapse.

[18] Later, on 27 January 2000, Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa stated, "I am not exaggerating when I say that the Corrective Movement, which took place in 1970 under the leadership of Hafez al-Assad ... has crystallized for the first time in modern Arab history a mature and realistic pan-Arab ideology.