More bad news for the Syrian dictator. His circle of friends is getting smaller:

Former Syrian Vice President Abdul-Halim Khaddam, a one-time stalwart of the ruling Baath Party, on Friday accused Syria’s President Bashar Assad of being personally involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri.

Khaddam made the claim as he declared a formal break with President Bashar Assad in a television interview from Paris, citing corruption within the regime and its failure to reform. He quoted the Syrian president as telling Hariri, months before he was killed: “You want to bring a (new) president in Lebanon. … I will not allow that. I will crush whoever attempts to overturn our decision.”

“No Syrian security service can reach a decision independently, besides the president. Bashar told me that people in Syria were involved [in the assassination] and that means that he was involved,” Khaddam said in the interview with Al-Arabiya, the pan-Arab satellite broadcaster, his first since he left Syria several months ago.

Why is this guy still in power? One reason (among others) is that there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable alternative to Assad, as noted by Lee Smith in a recent column in the Weekly Standard:

Washington may hope there is some plausible alternative to the Assads, but none is in evidence–not a secular, democratic opposition, not a reform movement in exile, not moderate Islamists. (Not even Islamist extremists, whose organizational capacity the regime has invariably exaggerated for its own purposes.) Thus, the regime has effectively booby-trapped Syria, and if it falls it is quite likely Syrians will shed each other’s blood.

Regime change in ‘06?

Update (Mac): Debka also notes:

DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources note that Haddam insinuated in the interview that Assad had had pre-knowledge of the murder and could have prevented it. He clearly laid the crime at Ghazaleh’s door and made it clear that the general would not have acted without Assad’s authority. This veteran Syrian politician’s diatribe against Assad is unprecedented and shocked opinion in Damascus and the Arab world.

Update (Mac) 12/31: That didn’t take long. Syrian lawmakers are demanding that Khaddam be tried for treason.