Solidarity on Syria

THE 15-to-0 resolution the Security Council passed Monday demanding that Syria cooperate fully with a UN investigation of last February's assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was less than the Bush administration had sought, but it was exactly the right move to make.

The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, had originally pushed for an explicit threat of sanctions under a particular article of the UN Charter. Other countries argued that it would be premature to resort to sanctions before the work of the UN commission headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is completed. The United States ceded nothing of significance when it agreed, for the sake of Security Council unity, to drop references to the UN Charter that are, in any case, superfluous. If Syria persists in refusing to turn over files requested by Mehlis, preventing investigators from interviewing Syrian officials named in his interim report, and issuing misleading or false statements, any action the Security Council decides to take will inevitably be taken under the UN Charter.

It is a good sign that, under the apparent direction of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, US diplomacy is developing an overdue respect for the opinions of other nations. In the current effort to make Syria own up to its increasingly obvious role in the murder of Hariri, there was a real danger that US insistence on a premature, explicit threat of UN sanctions would have diverted attention from the outlaw behavior of the regime of Syria's President Bashar Assad and toward speculation about an American agenda that some other governments suspect includes regime change in Damascus.

US restraint is wise not merely as an exercise in diplomatic pragmatism. Even Lebanese hostile to the Assad regime caution against international sanctions that would harm the already wretched populace living under Assad's police state without helping to either reform or remove that regime.

Few things could be more threatening to Assad and his inner circle than the legal process that has been set in motion. The interim Mehlis report named Assad's brother, Maher, head of a presidential guard force, and his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, chief of Syria's military intelligence, as suspects in the Hariri murder. It is hardly conceivable that these relatives plotted and executed the assassination without the knowledge and approval of the president. Already, one powerful figure in the regime has been declared a suicide, and a fabulously wealthy Assad crony has mysteriously left the country. A legitimate international criminal investigation is closing in on Assad; the best thing the United States can do is to be a team player and let the wheels of justice continue grinding toward Damascus.