SYRIA

The West’s inability (or even insouciance) in becoming embroiled to counter the aggression of the regime of Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Damascus has led to the crumbling of resistance in the city. It was here that the rebel army had its stronghold. The evacuation of Homs is the personification of Western diplomatic failure.

It was a year ago now when the appalling bloodshed and mayhem of the civil war in Syria drew unanimous condemnation from the West. Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people last August added to the anger as the ‘red lines’ pronounced previously by President Obama had been crossed. America insisted that would trigger a military intervention in the event of that happening. But politicians then baulked as the Labour Party in Britain defeated the Government in the House of Commons on proposed military intervention. Those feelings rippled across to the United States, as politicians on either side of the Atlantic became forced into embracing a new isolationism born of years of war weariness in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The result has been a rebellion that can justly claim to have been let down by a collective failure of will in the West. It is a failure which could yet bear bitter fruit in Islamist anger exported by the disillusioned Syrian rebel fighters to the wider world. With the death toll spiralling with at least 150,000 dead, it is right to ask what has happened.

In looking for an answer, we should focus on two countries which have kept the Assad regime afloat for their own narrow and precarious interests – Iran and Russia. Tehran’s religious Ayatollah’s see Assad as an essential Shia bulwark against the power of Sunni forces in the region. Vladimir Putin’s motivation is as much to do with Russia’s current power games with the West as it is with the Syrian conflict on its own terms.

It was Mr Putin’s intervention last autumn that halted Western military action against Assad’s forces, preventing the opportunity that a decisive intervention could have brought by affording the rebels a chance to triumph. They needed at least to have secured a corner of a divided and disparate nation. Whilst the regime’s chemical weapons and capabilities appears to be on-course for being dismantled by the UN set deadlines, the cost – a real and tangible one in terms of geopolitics – has been the survival and, indeed, the strengthening of Assad’s reign in power, as its poorly-equipped rebel opponents fade. Recently, for instance, the Syrian tyrant has spoken of holding on to power for another six years, inconceivable to the West who had all but in name considered regime change a fundamental tenet in Syria three years ago.

President Putin’s observations would have noted the West’s stalemate and inaction in Syria, as well as calculating a likely similar reticence on intervention elsewhere by both Washington and London. The annexation of Crimea and continued power games in Ukraine, particularly in the east of the country, are proof of that.

Mr Putin, clearly emboldened, regards the West as weak. There is no real counter to Russian aggression and expansionism, other than the ranking up of political rhetoric by Western leaders. Yet, the harder Mr Putin acts abroad the stronger his position at home has become, where growing nationalist sentiment has garnered support for their president’s actions – a useful distraction given Russia’s floundering economy and weakening currency, clear effects of western imposed sanctions.

The rebels of Homs will be one of many aggrieved by the West’s inaction in Syria.