DON'T NEED A WEATHERVANE TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS:

The Pentagon’s new pin-up boy (Toby Harnden, The Spectator)

Looking around the Arab world, not least in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, where thousands had gathered to demand an end to a Syrian occupation that began in 1976, Jumblatt concluded that Bush’s brand of freedom and democracy was the wave of the future. ‘Slowly but surely the Berlin Wall of Arab regimes is crumbling,’ he said, pausing as one of his parrots screeched. ‘There was voting in Iraq, voting in Palestine. When Arafat died, Abu Mazen was elected according to the constitution. The Saud family decided it was time for municipal elections. President Mubarak has decided that he’s not going to be the sole candidate in September. Things are really moving.’

But despite the Karl Rove talking points, Jumblatt is not exactly a sunny optimist. There were dark forces, he intimated, that would be difficult to defeat. ‘[President Bashar] Assad [of Syria] is trying to buy time. If he gets out of Beirut and the foreign policy of Lebanon, he’s going to lose a lot of prestige. And there’s another aspect — money. You have a joint Syrian–Lebanese mafia that is strangling the country.’ [...]

Long seen as a weathervane of Lebanese politics, Jumblatt has cleverly used shifting alliances to keep the Druze, under 10 per cent of the population, aligned with those on top. His rejection of Syria is a recognition that, on balance, Bush rather than Assad is calling the shots. He chuckled at the notion that he is now the darling of the neocons, though he fits almost to a tee the classic definition of the term — socially liberal, formerly left-wing, a believer in the efficacy of military power and the universal application of democracy. He even confessed to reading the works of Robert Kaplan. ‘After the compliments of Mr Wolfowitz, perhaps I should join the club.’

The future in Lebanon lies with the Shi'a, not the neocons.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2005 9:49 PM