Monday the Syrian regime announced that presidential elections will be held June 3. The State Department dismissed the news. “The fact that you would even think you can hold free and fair elections in the middle of a civil war,” said a State Department spokesman, “is absurd.”

It is surely the case that the reelection of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad will not be free and fair. The last time Syrians went to the polls in 2007, Assad won with 97.62 percent of the vote, a slight increase over his 97.29 tally in 2000. And this was all before Assad started shooting at unarmed protestors in March 2011. Now some 160,000 corpses later, it’s unlikely many Syrians will risk making their opposition to Assad known by voting against him. So yes, as the State Department notes, presidential elections in Syria, and especially now in the middle of a civil war, are absurd. The question then is, why is the Obama administration campaigning on behalf of Assad?