And the Winner Is … Assad!

Syria’s dictator won’t be punished for his poison gas massacre. In fact, he’ll be rewarded.

Now, the U.N. has confirmed that poison gas was widely used on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. No perpetrators were identified in their report, but missile parts collected at the scene point clearly in the direction of the Assad regime.

Despite that, Syria’s president won’t be punished for war crimes; instead, he will be rewarded, as it were. While it’s true that Assad will be forced to surrender his chemical weapons in accordance with the agreement struck by Russia and the United States, he still gets to legitimately stay in office. By way of the disarmament process, Assad will necessarily have to be involved with the international community, thus putting him back into the diplomatic game. For that, he is indebted in equal measure to Putin’s strength and Obama’s weakness.

The U.S. president has relinquished the helm of his Syrian odyssey to the Russian leader. Compared to Obama, the zigzag course run by an escaping rabbit seems almost straight and direct: First, with great bluster, he announced preparations for military action, then he delegated that decision to Congress with the expectation that House of Representatives would deny him permission to invade Assad in retaliation. In the end, the American procrastinator-in-chief happily got into the sleigh provided by the Russian president that led him to a dead end.

But only daydreamers believe that Assad will hand over all his chemical weapons to Russia by 2014 just because of Russian-Syrian friendship. In the midst of a civil war, Syria’s ruler has innumerable possibilities for stalling the U.N. inspectors. And the threat of military retaliation Obama seeks to continue propping up has already collapsed. The U.S. president is unable to mobilize sufficient support for military action — neither in Congress nor in the U.N. Security Council. And Assad will emerge unscathed as the winner.