Bush a Genius Says NY Times

revel,
I did not say what you now need me to provide proof of. Nowhere in my post do I link the current peace negotiation process between Israelians and Palestinians and the war in Iraq. All I did was agree with someone in the earlier pages when he hinted to American interventions in the current process. Since I don't take all that I hear in the news for granted, I allow myself some room for doubt, and I did say that it was a bit too complicated for my blood to predict any outcome.

Careful Lash, you're getting close to indicating support for the surrender-monkeys

Quote:

Egypt, Saudi, France, Germany join the US in demanding the Syria leave Lebanon.

btw what evidence have you seen that Syria's ocupation of Lebanon has done other than maintain some sembalance of stability in what had been the most tumultuous area of the ME?

How DARE those French and German social communists join the US in demanding that Syria leave Lebanon!!

Looks like it's back to Freedom Fries...

Lash wrote:

That's a little nutty, Dookie...

...and there is a good lesson in the importance of punctuation. Still applicable without the comma.

What comma? :wink:

I'm still not seeing Iraq as a catalyst. The assassination was a catalyst. Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was a catalyst (removing any legitimate reason for Syrian troops to be there). I'm just not seeing a direct connection with Iraq.

The Road to Damascus
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 4, 2005; Page A21

Revolutions do not stand still. They either move forward or die. We are at the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East. It was triggered by the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and televised images of 8 million Iraqis voting in a free election. Which led to the obvious question throughout the Middle East: Why the Iraqis and not us?

To be sure, the rolling revolution began outside the Middle East with the Afghan elections. That was followed by the Iraqi elections. In between came free Palestinian elections that produced a moderate, reform-oriented leadership, followed by an amazing mini-uprising in the Palestinian parliament that rejected an attempt to force corrupt cronies on the new government.

And it continued -- demonstrations in Egypt for democracy, a shocking rarity that led President Hosni Mubarak to promise the first contested presidential elections in Egyptian history. And now, of course, the "cedar revolution" in Lebanon, where the assassination of opposition leader Rafiq Hariri led to an explosion of people power in the streets that brought down Syria's puppet-government in Beirut.

Revolution is in the air. What to do? We are already hearing voices for restraint about liberating Lebanon. Flynt Leverett, your usual Middle East expert, took to the New York Times to oppose the immediate end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Instead, we should be trying to "engage and empower" the tyranny in Damascus.

These people never learn. Here we are on the threshold of what Arabs in the region are calling the fall of their own Berlin Wall and our "realists" want us to go back to making deals with dictators. It would be not just a blunder but a tragedy. It would betray our principles. And it would betray the people in Lebanon who have been encouraged by those principles.

Moreover, the cedar revolution promises not only to liberate Lebanon but to transform the Middle East. Why? Because a forced Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could bring down the Assad dictatorship. And changing Damascus would transform the region.

We are not talking about invading Syria. We have done enough invading and there is no need. If Bashar Assad loses Lebanon, his regime could be fatally weakened.

This is for two reasons: economics and psychology. Like all Soviet-style systems, the Syrian economy is moribund. It lives off Lebanese commerce and corruption. Take that away and a pillar of the Assad kleptocracy disappears. As does the psychological pillar. Dictatorships such as Assad's rule by fear, which is sustained by power and the illusion of power. Control of Lebanon is the centerpiece of that illusion. Its loss, at the hands of unarmed civilians no less, would be a deadly blow to the Assad mystique.

Bashar Assad has succeeded Saddam Hussein as the principal bad actor in the region. Syria, an island of dictatorship in a sea of liberalization, is desperately trying to destabilize its neighbors. The Hariri bombing is universally believed to be the work of Syria. The orders for last Friday's Tel Aviv bombing, designed to blow up the new Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement, came from Damascus. And we know that Syria is sheltering leading Baathist insurgents who are killing Iraqis and Americans.

There was a brief Damascus Spring five years ago when Syrians began demanding more freedom. Assad repressed it. Now 140 Syrian intellectuals have petitioned their own government to withdraw from Lebanon. They signed their names. The fear is lifting there, too. Were the contagion to spread to Damascus, the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iranian border would be on a path to democratization.

This could all be reversed, of course. Liberal revolutions were suppressed in Europe in 1848, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Tiananmen Square in 1989. Determined and ruthless regimes can extinguish revolutions. Which is why the worst thing we can do is "engage and empower" tyrants.

This is no time to listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise and fear. If we had listened to them two years ago, we would still be doing oil for food, no-fly zones and worthless embargoes. It is our principles that brought us to this moment by way of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to guide us now -- through Beirut to Damascus.

Arab world squirms at impact of Bush's call for freedom
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor
(Filed: 01/03/2005)

In the few weeks since President George W Bush declared in his inaugural speech that America would defend itself by promoting "the expansion of freedom in all the world", his speech appears to be having a revolutionary impact on the Middle East.

Iraqis have defied the bombers to go to the polls, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak has announced multi-party presidential elections, Palestinians will unveil a democratic reform package in London today and, last night, Lebanon's prime minister resigned in the face of "people power" on Beirut's streets.

Many Arab intellectuals had mocked President Bush's talk of freedom as a rhetorical flourish to justify regime change by force of American arms.

But for the moment Mr Bush has no need for his tanks: his words carried on the airwaves of Arab satellite television have been enough to discomfit the lifetime presidents, kings and sheikhs of the Arab world.

Syria, in particular, is feeling the pressure. In an attempt to ingratiate itself with America, Damascus last week handed over Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half-brother who has mastermind the insurgency from a safe haven in Syria.

It is unclear how far Syria will go in co-operating with the new Iraqi government against the insurgents but Syria will not easily give up its control of Lebanon.

Now, suddenly, there has been a wave of change across the region.

Firstly, the US regained its confidence in Iraq after successfully holding elections on Jan 30 despite months of attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

In Palestine, the bloody stalemate with Israel was broken last November by the death of the veteran Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

The pace of change in the Palestinian Authority has been accelerated by pressure from Mr Bush, who declared as long ago as June 2003 that Palestinians should elect leaders "not tainted by terror".

The pressure for Syria to leave Lebanon has been building since Israel withdrew from the south of the country in 2000.

America had effectively allowed Syria to turn Lebanon into its vassal in 1990, as a reward for supporting the US-led coalition in evicting Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

But America's attitude changed after the war to remove Saddam Hussein.

Syria was accused of providing a haven for the former Iraqi regime to organise the insurgency.

Some senior American officials believe Syria may have inherited the stocks of weapons of mass destruction that vanished from Iraq.

In 2003, the US Congress authorised Mr Bush to impose sanctions on Damascus under the Syria Accountability Act.

Last September America buried the hatchet with France and co-sponsored a UN resolution telling Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. Syria may have calculated that the way to keep America off its back was to keep it bogged down in Iraq.

After all, President Bashar al-Assad's father had successfully manipulated the civil war in Lebanon to defeat Israel as well as the US, French and other peacekeeping forces briefly deployed in Beirut in 1982.

But the younger Assad appears to be much less capable than his father had been. Where his father made himself a central Arab leader, wooed by all, the current President Assad has become increasingly isolated.

Surrounded by foes such as Israel to the east, Turkey to the north and now the US army to the east, Syria had always relied on its ability to appeal to the nationalist heart of the Arab world.

Now unrest in Beirut is destroying this vestige of legitimacy. Unless Assad can transform himself, two bombs in February - one that murdered the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and the other last week's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv blamed on Syrian-backed radicals - may come to be seen as marking the final decline of his regime. Mr Bush will doubtless be hoping that this "domino effect" will also be felt on the other side of Iraq - in Iran.

The problem for Mr Bush is that, unless the clerical regime is overthrown or changes dramatically, Iran could come dangerously close to developing its own nuclear weapon. Then Mr Bush may decide that mere words are no longer enough to protect America's interests.

That's a nice story, really, but unfortunately it masks the fact that all the countries in the ME are not in the same ghetto. Some of them are not in a ghetto at all. So if someone in the ghetto puts out a flower box, and someone in the suburbs cuts his overgrown lawn, was the flower box the catalyst? Or is it Spring time?

McG, I read your editorial. While interesting, I guess I don't see the fact that someone agrees with you that Iraq was the catalyst for Lebanon as conclusive. Someone might agree with me that it wasn't. But I'll leave it alone until more info comes in.

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it." [Washington Post]

But none of the people in the Middle East, except for Israel and Turkey, were free. And Turkey isn't really regarded as part of the Middle East and Israel isn't regarded as a member of the the club.

So as one, then another people of a formerly despotic government are seen dancing in the street celebrating their new freedoms, I just suspect it puts notions in the heads of others. It just seems beyond the limits of probability of coincidence that so many, at this time, are coming up with the same notions.