As international pressure and attention focuses squarely on Iran and the increasingly worrisome statements of the country’s president, it’s easy to forget about another threat to regional stability: Bashar al-Assad. Syria’s feared president is counting on this global attention deficit disorder and increasingly cracking down on his people, according to several experts in the region.  Over at CFR.org, U.S. Institute of Peace analyst Mona Yacoubian is quoted as saying, “The Syrian government made a fairly astute calculation that with Iran on top of the international agenda and the United States mired in Iraq, the chances of coordinated international action against Syria are quite small.”

Reports of the Syrian regime’s jailing of political opponents, journalists, and human rights activists abound, from Reuters to the IHT to the Gulf Times.

The moves are particularly brazen, considering the ongoing U.N. investigation into former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination, which has already implicated top Syrian officials. In fact, just yesterday, Belgian U.N. investigator Serge Brammertz interrogated Assad for any role he might have played in Hariri’s February 2005 murder. Brammertz emerged from the meeting and announced that Assad was cooperating fully.

So what’s the United States to do? Likely frustrated with the pace of the investigation, the Bush administration announced just hours after Brammertz concluded his meeting that it would freeze the assets of anyone involved in Hariri’s death.

I asked a Syria expert with considerable experience with the country about the situation. That person’s take (sorry, can't name names) is that freezing assets is just about as hard as the United States can hit Damascus at the present time:

We have made this assassination a cause celebre and we do not have the options we had when the Iraq war was going a bit better and the Iran problem had not flared up. Threats to freeze personal assets are one of the few leverages we have for squeezing those we think can give information.

Chances are, Assad would interpret these moves by the United States as desperation more than pressure. At least until the next U.N. report on the Hariri case is released in June, it looks like you can count political reforms and freedom in Syria as a casualty of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear brinksmanship—and of the war in Iraq.