Occam's Razor In Damascus

Daniel Pipes, generally worth listening to where Syria is concerned, has the simplest answer to the vexing question of why Bashar Assad would have ordered the Hariri hit: because he's stupid. Returning to the creation myth of contemporary Syria, the death of Basil Assad (Sonny to Bashar's Fredo), he depicts underwhelming history of Bashar's presidency, winding up:

With his flair for incompetence, Mr. Assad presumably decided that the former prime minister had to die for this betrayal. But, quite contrary to Mr. Assad's presumed expectations, far from reducing pressures on Syria to leave Lebanon, the atrocity magnified and intensified them.

Whole thing here.