"...At the end, the Hariri tribunal will achieve nothing.."

In the Atlantic, here

"...When Mehlis launched his probe, Assad’s Syria was a full-fledged pariah state, accused by the Bush administration of backing Hezbollah and arming the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq. (Despite the regime’s inherent hostility toward Sunni extremists, Assad perceived a shared interest with them in inflicting pain on the United States.) At that time, the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia viewed the investigation commission and tribunal as a means to press for the downfall of Assad, whose regime the leaders of all three countries regarded as a force for radicalization......

Several leaders who backed the tribunal’s formation had had personal ties to Hariri: the French president, Jacques Chirac, had been a close friend since his time as mayor of Paris, and had been one of the few Western leaders to attend Hariri’s funeral, in Beirut. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah also was close to Hariri, a fellow Sunni......

Brammertz believed that Mehlis had been carried away by anti-Syrian sentiment: “Mehlis conveyed a sense that he had raced ahead under international pressure to implicate Syria, without checking the admissibility of the sources.”.......

Hariri’s supporters in Lebanon accused the UN of trying to whitewash the final report. “Brammertz was so absent from the public eye that he projected the sense that nothing was happening,” the Western diplomat told me. ....Mehlis himself has fanned those suspicions.....

the UN insider told me that among the staff, the possibility that the tribunal could be sabotaged by key figures within the UN Security Council, or at the highest levels of Western governments, has become a constant topic of conversation. Assad’s diplomatic overtures, he said, have led some UN staff members to believe “that the investigation will be sold down the river, or it will lead to a minor official being indicted.” That view is also put forth by the Syrian exile with ties to the regime, who expects that the tribunal will be allowed to wither away. He went on to tell me: “It will have financial problems, it will have trouble bringing people to the court. You will hear, ‘This one vanished, this one was killed, this one is a liar.’ At the end, the tribunal will achieve nothing.”