http://juancole.com/

Bush is aware that the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, of which he and the Wall Street Journal were so proud last year, is in danger of being undone. He politely asked the Israelis please not to bring down the Lebanese government, but that is probably as far as he dares go in an election year, given the support for Israel of his evangelical base.

But of course there was always a severe contradiction in the Bush position on the 2005 Lebanese elections, which were the freest and fairest in some time-- given the departure of Syria's military from the country. Those elections brought to power a government in which the hard line Shiite fundamentalist party, Hizbullah, had cabinet posts for the first time. The US under Clinton had consistently warned Beirut not to admit Hizbullah to the government, and even the Bush administration had adopted that position as recently as January of 2004.

A Lebanon with no Syrian troops and Hizbullah in the government was inherently unstable. All the other parties but Hizbullah had disarmed, so it alone had its own paramilitary. With Syria gone, Hizbullah filled a security vacuum and also was less restrained in its policies. While in the country, Syria supported the party, but also curbed its adventurism.

So this was Bush's big success in the Levant. It was as though a chef baked a lopsided wedding cake with a ticking bomb embedded in it, and declared it a culinary breakthrough. Now the bomb has gone off.
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