03 March 2005 Blog Home : March 2005 : Permalink
I am sad to say that I have friends and colleagues whose first reaction, on seeing the bunting of the Cedar Revolution, was to scoff. "Huh," I heard someone say, "just look at those flags - I bet they were all provided by the CIA. You could never run off a load of flags that quickly. It's all an American plot," he said, "just like that business in the Ukraine."
"Yeah," said someone else, "and the last time I was in Beirut I talked to a taxi driver who said he liked the Syrian army. These neo-cons don't understand that the Syrians have brought stability to Lebanon. The Lebanese like having all those Syrians standing around with guns."
Well, my friends, I can understand your pique at the way in which history is apparently vindicating Mark Steyn. If there is one thing worse than a stridently triumphalist American neo-con, it is a stridently triumphalist American neo-con who seems to be right.
But in so far as the Americosceptics think the Syrian army has been good for Lebanon, they seem to be at odds not only with the Lebanese people, but also with most of Arab opinion. The Syrians have been intermittently brutal in their occupation; they have taken Lebanese water; they have kidnapped and detained without trial. It is time that Bashar Assad removed all 14,000 of them, and so say 77 per cent of the Arab world, according to Al-Jazeera, and newspapers from Jordan to Kuwait to Egypt.
The protests in Lebanon have hugely increased the likelihood of that withdrawal and, if Jumblatt is right, those protests have been sparked by democracy in Iraq. We may be on the verge of a process as wonderful as he thinks; and we should not allow any anti-Americanism, any hatred of Bush, any doubts about the war, to tempt us to hope otherwise.
What with nice editorials in the Grauniad and the NY Times recently, I'd say that the saner part of the anti-Bushies are begining to see the light. Maybe the rest of them should realise that crow is more digestible the sooner it is eaten.