Only hard power works with a despot

Aphoto on Syria’s presidential Facebook page on Tuesday showed President Bashar al-Assad grinning widely as he sat in the cockpit of a Sukhoi SU-27 jet during a visit to the Russian-operated Hmeimim military base. He seemed to be in a very good mood.

And why not? After five years of fighting and untold rivers of blood, the bits of the country he controls have expanded to the point he now feels safe enough to travel all the way to Hama, a full 185 km from Damascus, where he attended prayers on Sunday for the Eid alFitr holiday. A year ago Assad was able to go no further than Homs for the occasion. That’s what an additional year of slaughter and barbarity has brought him: about 40 extra kilometres of territory where he can travel without fear of running into well-armed enemies out to topple or kill him.

The map of Syria now looks like someone threw a child’s paint set against a wall and let the colours run. Assad’s government controls a portion up and down the Mediterranean coast around Damascus, connected by a thin corridor to Aleppo, the ruined city regained by the regime at appalling cost late last year. Kurdish forces hold a large swath of the northeast, where the next war may take place over Kurdish independence. ISIL — the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — continues to survive in areas west of the capital, though it has been steadily losing ground. Various rebel groups dominate pockets to the north and south, while Israel maintains its long hold of the Golan Heights and Turkish-backed fighters dominate a parcel along the Turkish border. Some parts of the country remain for grabs.

As fractured as it may appear, for Assad it’s an improvement over the early years of the war, when Western leaders took turns guaranteeing his downfall and it appeared at times their predictions might come true. If not for the irresolution of the Obama White House, with its reluctance to become too deeply involved in yet another Middle East quagmire and Barack Obama’s retreat from the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, Assad might not still be around to celebrate his success. He owes much of it to the Russians