Bashar al-Assad the Big Winner

There have been great survivors in the political world but perhaps none more so than Bashar al-Assad, just voted in by his "adoring" electorate as president of Syria for a fourth term in office, giving him another seven years in power. He was said to have won 95.1 per cent of the vote with a 75 per cent turn-out. That was almost as high a vote as Saddam Hussein used to win when he stood for reelection as president of Iraq. In Iraq under his regime no one dared to vote for anyone else. In Syria a tiny number voted for two political "opponents" but I suspect they were told this was all right to make the democratic vote look truly, wonderfully democratic. So while the election was clearly arranged to produce the result it did, Assad is still a great survivor because for at least five years the whole of the Western world, led by the United States, was all for persuading him to step down and allow a real election to be held in the hope and expectation that someone more acceptable - acceptable to the West - would be voted in and bring peace to Syria. It never happened because Assad had the mighty backing of Russia and Vladimir Putin. His Russian bosom pal sent thousands of Spetsnaz special forces and private contractors from the Wagner Group, the Kremlin's favourite mercenary organisation, to help keep Assad in power and drive off any threats to his regime. It was a cunning move by Putin to back Assad this way, along with fighter bombers based in western Syria to join the anti-Isis campaign to lend legitimacy to the Russian military presence. Assad was safe. There was never ever going to be a change in regime. Putin won, Assad won and the US and the West lost. The American, British, French and others' involvement in fighting Isis, supporting the brilliant, largely Kurdish militias, was without question a success story. Isis collapsed and the caliphate was destroyed. But in the wider political game, the plan to oust Assad without actually firing a single shot against him, was a failure. Putin saw to that. Now Assad has another seven years to be Russia's puppet leader and Moscow will no doubt make maximum use of their man's election victory. Moscow has already sent three nuclear-capable long-range bombers to the airbase at Khmeimim in western Syria giving them easy access to the Mediterranean to carry out surveillance missions of Nato warships operating in the area. I always remember Barack Obama saying many times that Assad would have to go for the sake of Syria's future. But I'm afraid to say, Syria's future is Assad.