The most disturbing aspect of this blackmail is how few opinion-shapers in the West feel outraged enough to condemn it, let alone grasp what is at stake in the Hariri tribunal. Here is a unique opportunity to hold murderers accountable for a political crime, and yet an increasing number of Western politicians, pundits and researchers are finding nice things to say about Syria, advocating its “engagement”, unconcerned about what it has done and continues to do in ­Lebanon.

Take the author William Dalrymple. In October 2007 in the Spectator, he defended the Syrian regime on the grounds that it gives “minorities a security and stability far greater than anywhere else in the region. This is particularly true of Syria’s ancient Christian communities.” His article would have been more persuasive if it had mentioned the cheerless fate of the majority in Syria, even as it missed how the status of a prominent minority, the country’s 1.5 million Kurds, leaves much to be desired. Or he could have mentioned how harmful the Assad regime has been to the most assertive and independent of Middle Eastern Christians, those in Lebanon, marginalising them and killing two Christian presidents who threatened Syrian supremacy. Dalrymple accepted that Syria was repressive, but forgot to laugh when adding that it is “a police state that tends to leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics”.

There was also Dalrymple’s descent into urbane cynicism. He argued that “the Middle East is not a place where simplistic notions of Good Guys and Bad Guys make much sense. It is a place of murky moral greys.” That won’t change with observers as indulgent as Dalrymple. But when he published his piece the Hariri tribunal had already been put on track. In Dalrymple’s shifty paean to the Assads, in his resort to moral relativism, he ignored the fact that the UN was creating a venue that might help sharpen some of the “moral greys”.