A Warning To Washington.

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Fulbright scholar in Damascus, wrote in The New York Times of Sept. 19 arguing against regime change in Syria. Assad's regime, he said, "is certainly no paragon of democracy, but even its most hard-bitten enemies...[in Damascus] do not want to see it collapse. Why? Because authoritarian culture extends into the deepest corners of Syrian life...[such as] mosques". (But Landis is exaggerating the fear of Bashar's collapse among the Syrians as many of them are already preparing for a post-Bashar era).

Bashar would have been the first Syrian president in 40 years to visit the US had he attended the UN's World Summit in New York on Sept. 14-17 as planned. And, as Landis wrote, "it could have been an opportunity for two countries that have notably tense relations to talk".

Instead, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delayed Bashar's visa, "excluded him from a key meeting of rich donors' foreign ministers to discuss Lebanon and Syria, and had a UN investigator arrive in Damascus at the time of his departure". Boxed in, Assad cancelled his plans. The Syrians were shocked, realising how fragile his regime had become. Why?

Closing In On Bashar: Because the UN investigator Mehlis was closing in on Bashar's regime in the Hariri case, a high-profile international case. If the Bashar regime is implicated, it would be implicated in the death of most Lebanese leaders killed in Lebanon since Hafez al-Assad  ordered his troops to occupy the country in April 1976. A German prosecutor and head of a large UN team probing the Hariri murder, Mehlis has caused the arrests of four top Syria-made Lebanese generals and a legislator and has asked others to come forward.

Mehlis recently said: "...we feel we took a very important step. But these five suspects we have arrested, in our assessment, are only part of the picture". It was, by all accounts, a classic performance from a man who had spent the past two decades getting into the minds of terrorists, investigating and prosecuting some of Europe's most complex cases. Mehlis knew very well the psychological impact, on both the public and potential suspects, of arresting four generals once thought untouchable. Emphasising that more suspects were to come drove the message home even deeper. In his quiet, unassuming way, he made it clear that he knew much more than he was letting on, and that was enough to make the Bashar regime in Syria and its Lebanese allies very nervous.

The New York Times on Sept. 18 quoted Mehlis as saying the key to terrorist investigations was to develop a personal relationship with the suspects, to understand their motivations, which can help to open them up in questioning. He said: "I always try to learn what he did, why he did it, and I definitely don't like this black-and-white thing". To some, Mehlis is a fox ready to pounce; to others, he is a poker player with a knack for roping in his suspects; to still others he is a canny political actor who will stop at nothing to win a high-profile case. Those who know the German investigator best, however, see him as a master puzzler, one who has unravelled complex webs with equal bits of patience, discipline and ties to intelligence people throughout the world. In 1986, he helped convict two Palestinians of attempted murder and weapons violations in the bombing of the German-Arab Friendship Society in Bonn, in which nine people were injured and Syria was implicated. A decade later, thanks to release of evidence from the files of the CIA and the Stasi, the East German secret police, he successfully prosecuted the long-stalled case of the 1986 bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin, which left two US servicemen dead and led the US to bomb Libya. He tied the act to the Libyan Embassy in East Germany. More recently he prosecuted the case of Johannes Weinrich, the top aide to the imprisoned terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. In Lebanon, Mehlis is piecing together the myriad scraps of evidence, hundreds of witness statements and mounds of intelligence.

More manager than a hands-on detective, he oversees a team of 100 investigators who produce evidence which is mostly shared with Lebanese judges and prosecutors, who then take legal action. So far, he and his investigators have spoken to nearly 300 witnesses, and re-examined the bomb site in Beirut in minute detail. Most important, they have managed to coax people into coming forward to provide details. On Sept. 12, they won co-operation from the Syrian government to start the next, perhaps most controversial, leg of the investigation: looking into Syrian ties to the bombing. They have been helped greatly in that effort by a former member of Syria's security services in Lebanon who came forward in August, yielding a rich trove of evidence and helping tie up numerous loose ends in the investigation. That testimony led directly to the arrests of the four top generals, who were charged with murder. They remain in custody in a Lebanese prison.

Mehlis knows who he is dealing with. He is a prosecutor who, when he is assigned to the case, will go all the way. That makes him the ideal player in an international investigation. A native of Berlin, Mehlis began in 1978 as a generalist in the German attorney general's office, but gravitated to investigating terror crimes. He showed a knack for cases involving explosives, rising to prominence in the turbulent 1980s in Germany and achieving a modest celebrity with the La Belle bombing case. The Hariri case is his most challenging yet.

The physical evidence at the crime scene was tampered with, and Mehlis' team had to contend with foot-dragging and stone-walling by Syria and its allies in Lebanon that have twice led Mehlis to request an extension. But the greatest concern is whether Mehlis can resist the political pressures surrounding the case. There are powerful interests which would like to see the investigation implicate Bashar and other top Syrian officials, and not pin the crime on lesser figures in Lebanon. The Bush administration, for one, has made no secret of its desire to see Assad driven from power. Critics in the Assad camp contend that politics has already played a major role in the investigation. Hussein Haidar, a prominent attorney whose son was killed in the Feb. 14 blast, said the initial signs from Mehlis were promising. Haidar added: "What he's done so far proved my initial hunch - he didn't get political". Mehlis said: "I am reading newspapers. I am listening to people... I am meeting with politicians... The only thing the team and I care about is which person did it, for what purposes and who helped them".

Writing in the Daily Star of Beirut on Sept. 21, David Hirst, a long time Middle East correspondent for The Guardian, said: "...if Mehlis goes on to demand the arraignment of suspects as high-ranking as their Lebanese counterparts - and, if Syria is indeed guilty, the trail will indubitably lead to the innermost circles of power - will he cede that too? For the weak head of a regime built round clan solidarity and the consensus of rival power fiefdoms, an attempt to save himself and a chosen part of it through the sacrifice of another part is, Syrians say, a 'red line' he simply dares not cross. It is a recipe for an internal explosion which, in the absence of a really effective opposition, has long been seen as the likeliest manner of the Baathists' eventual undoing. But to defy Mehlis, as Assad may yet do, and to portray the investigator and his works as an American-led conspiracy against Syria, would seem almost as suicidal. It would turn Syria into an international pariah, align Europe behind economic sanctions, and, far from rousing an already disaffected and restive people in patriotic defense, further persuade them that their government is the prime source of their deepening woes, with the Hariri murder as the crowning blunder for which they must pay".

Hirst added: "The Syrian people's, especially the opposition's, excitement as they contemplate their rulers' dilemma stems from the prospect of seeing some of the latter getting their comeuppance before an international tribunal. Their fear, even among this self-same opposition, comes from their belief that, thanks to the legacy of Baathist rule, a regime crisis would automatically degenerate into a national one, even into civil war. So serious is that fear that 'apres moi le deluge' is seen as Assad's last great card, his only chance of clinching a grand bargain - the yielding of all his strategic assets, in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and the Golan, that have furnished the means to impede or assist American purposes, in return for survival, and continued mastery, in his own house".

Hirst concluded with these questions: "If the Syrian people themselves are so worried, shouldn't the world be too? Would the US really like Syria to go the way of Iraq? If, in the era of...Bush's 'freedom and democracy', Washington was cynical enough to strike such a bargain with a minor player like Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, might it not do the same with an embattled Assad, for much greater reward and involving a country at the strategic and emotional heart of the Arab world?" (Hirst is author of "The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East").