ASSASSINATION of one’s political opponents is nothing more and nothing less than censorship taken to a pathological, not to mention criminal, extreme.

Those in Syrian intelligence who committed the Valentine’s Day Massacre, that offed Rafik Hariri and 21 others in his entourage, were clearly accomplished assassins but bumbling political analysts. They had executed the act with determined professionalism, but never bothered, it seems, to contemplate its ramifications or potential repercussions. In return, they got for the regime, on whose behalf they worked and whose putative interests they pursued, a dish of justice served hot.

The investigative report by the United Nations commission prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, made public last Thursday, is troubling in the way it implicates Syrian officials and equally troubling for the Syrian regime as it faces possible sanctions by the international community.

The report claims that the killings on Feb. 14 had been carefully planned over many months by Syrian leaders with the complicity of Lebanese security forces. The main suspect was identified as the powerful chief of Syria’s military intelligence, Asef Shawkat, who is the most powerful man in the country after the president.

In addition to many other names of high officials whom he implicated in the plot, Mehlis alleged that the country’s foreign minister, in a letter responding to questions put to him, had deliberately gone out of his way to “mislead” the investigators.

The report should not have been taken lightly. Mehlis, a UN official, is a 25-year veteran of the Berlin prosecutor’s office with a record of solving high-profile terror cases. On the Hariri case, he spent four months interviewing 400 witnesses and suspects and looked at more than 16,000 pages of documents, aided by 30 investigators and 70 staff, before he finally released his 54-page report.

But that’s exactly how Syrian officials viewed the serious allegations leveled against them — lightly.

The country’s UN ambassador in New York, Faisal Mehada, said dismissively that it was “politically motivated.” In Damascus, the information minister, Mahdi Dkhlalah, said that “It is impossible that a fair court would accept a report like this, relying as it does on mere talk.” The assistant foreign minister, Ahmad Arnus, claimed that the report “puts Syria in the dock and vilifies it without evidence.”

This is all hectoring, precisely the wrong posture for Syria, now more isolated than at any time in its modern history, to adopt. Damascus can either cooperate or indeed find itself in that dock. In this case, it cannot hope to ride out the storm by stonewalling. The UN report marshals undeniable proof of its complicity. It is incumbent upon Syria’s government then to come clean and show that the assassination of Hariri was a rogue operation — if indeed that was what it had been all along. But it cannot prevaricate.

Syria ruled Lebanon for three decades, going incrementally from peacekeeper to overlord, but refused the whole while to believe that social systems and human communities evolve and transform in time. It refused, in other words, to adapt to all the political change that was taking place in the world at large.

Even after cracks began to appear in the once solid shell the Damascus regime built around itself, it failed to liberate its economy from socialist stultification or to develop closer ties to the West. In Lebanon, it created a world of intrigue and violence in which assassination of opposition figures, from journalists to academics, was seen as a legitimate tool for achieving political goals, and where the appointment of Lebanese government officials was made by diktat from the Syrian capital.

The end result of that sorrowful mess? It left a scarring effect on the consciousness of the overwhelming majority of the people of Lebanon. The last straw, of course, was the murder of Hariri soon after he was threatened with having his country smashed over his head if he did not comply with the illegal extension of the mandate of the country’s president, a Syrian ally.

Mehlis’ report also includes the transcript of a tape recording in which Rustum Ghazali, Syria’s most recent intelligence chief in Lebanon, warns Hariri two weeks before his murder that “we and the security services here have put you in a corner.”

Alas, it is the Syrian regime that now finds itself in a corner, as the US this week calls on the UN to take action against it and, in a sign of sudden escalation between Damascus and the international community, Britain demanded that the world body consider punitive sanctions.

By murdering Hariri, Syrian intelligence, professional assassins but dumb dialecticians, decided to take the plunge anyhow, only to find that the pool was empty — thus taking their country into the unchartered territory of international condemnation, sanctions and ostracism.

This is all sad, sad news for an Arab world reeling at the calamitous events in Iraq and at its helplessness to alleviate the numbing poverty and unspeakable destitution of the people of Palestine. And now Syria, once “the heart of Arabism,” brought to account, perhaps ultimately to its knees.

The moral of the story here is that none of this would have happened if Arab society was governed by laws and institutions, if it had not allowed itself to become harrowed and beaten, broken in back and spirit, unable to meet the challenges of modernity.

By refusing to allow the emergence of a free culture, liberated from the taboos of censorship, by hunting down, incarcerating or torturing to death those adversarial individuals whose necessary role in social life is to seek an articulation of the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct, Arab society has become easy prey — in Palestine, in Iraq and, well, now in Syria.

Sundry Arab regimes have built between the Arab mind and the facts a wall of myth. They built debilitated societies whose survival was underwritten by coercion and violence, where the individual is raised on the ethic of fear — fear of originality and innovation, fear to grow and freshen, fear of life itself. It’s like a poison, sifting silently into the social bone, weakening you and then weakening you some more. That’s when the baying wolves attack.

In all honesty, we brought all this on ourselves. We and we alone are to blame.