And the Winner Is...

Just got back to Beirut after a quick, depressing trip to Damascus. Before I left Syria, the Interior Ministry announced that Bashar Al Assad won Sunday's referendum on whether he should continue as Syria's president by 97.6 percent of the vote.

No surprises here. Bashar "won" by a little less than that in 2000. And the actual number itself is meaningless because -- do I even have to say it? -- the books are completely cooked. I mean, really, if turnout was 95 percent as officials claim, that means the government counted about 20 million paper ballots in around 36 hours.

No, the depressing part about the referendum was the Stalinist-style campaign that preceded it and which will continue through to the inauguration. As I wrote in my post on Sunday, sometimes it feels as if every exposed surface space in central Damascus is covered in portraits of Bashar.

At first, it's funny to see all these cartoonish cameos of the Noble Leader, until you realized that such a display of single-minded authoritarianism is only possible in a country that is suffering from a massive sense of humor failure. This unvarnished idol worshipping exists totally outside of irony.

In the past, I've heard stories about people in Syria being jailed for passing on e-mail jokes about the president. And, it's true that the Assad regime prepared for the referendum by jailing a slew of opposition candidates; and it temporarily shut the offices of a newspaper that published cartoons lampooning the parliamentary elections last month. But it's also very easy to exaggerate the extent of the crackdown against dissidents and would be satirists.

For one thing, the Syrian opposition is a bad joke. There can't be more than 20 key figures among the secular opposition parties, and most of them just whine. The day of the referendum, my friend Andrew Tabler (editor of Syria Today) and I met with a member of the opposition movement known as the Damascus Declaration, who complained about how all the new cars flooding the highways of Syria were cheap imports that would break down in 10 years. ("Surely, that's not Bashar Al Assad's fault," Andrew said.) This is apparently what passes for opposition economic critique.

But the really bad joke is that the Middle East is in such dire straits at the moment that even a second-tier strongman like Bashar looks like a steady pair of hands compared to the chaos surrounding him. Bashar is hardly blameless in these matters: the US accuses him of supporting terrorists in Iraq, Israel and Lebanon. But the United States has given democracy and reform such a bad name in the Middle East that Bashar might even have won a real election. Too bad we'll never know.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut