“The Baathist regime in Syria is behaving the same way it behaved in Lebanon, making mistake after mistake,” wrote Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir in his last published column before his assassination yesterday, according to a translation by Reuters. The murder of Kassir, who was a columnist for a Lebanese newspaper, An-Nahar, may have been the Syrian regime’s latest mistake, for the killing is widely viewed as retribution for Kassir’s outspoken criticism of Syria.

“Bashar al-Assad and Emile Lahoud are behind it,” a senior Lebanese opposition leader, Marwan Hamade, told the Christian Science Monitor, referring to the dictator in Damascus and the pro-Syrian president of Lebanon. “Samir Kassir was a defender of democracy in the Arab world and a courageous journalist who confronted dictatorships, especially the joint dictatorship established by Lebanon and Syria.”

“The Syrian regime is responsible from head to toe for this horrific terrorist crime. Lebanon’s opposition should promptly close ranks anew to have every Syrian intelligence cell left behind in Lebanon ruthlessly smashed,” the general manager of An-Nahar, Gebran Tueini, told reporters at the scene. “Bashar al-Assad should not be allowed to have a single intelligence operative lingering in Lebanon.”

Two weeks ago, the United Nations verified that Syrian troops and military intelligence operatives had fully withdrawn from Lebanon. “It’s the Syrian troops which have been withdrawn, and so, in principle, Lebanon should be free of all foreign forces today,” the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said at the time. Yesterday’s murder underscored the emptiness of Mr. Annan’s assurances.

The Syrian dictatorship is tottering and weak. President Bush has decided that Bashar al-Assad will be gone and that the route to Iran is through Syria. Someday historians will see the murder of Samir Kassir, like the recent Syrian missile attack on Turkey that the New York Times was reporting last night, as a last desperate gasp of a failing regime that realized that the mere existence of a semi-free press in a neighboring state was enough to pose a mortal threat to its own existence. It is a fact that tells much about the nature of the Syrian regime and why its end can’t come soon enough.