Lebanon: Worth Saving

Michael Young, who is both the Opinion Editor of the Beirut Daily Star and a Contributing Editor to REASON, has a piece on Reasononline titled Liberal Lebanon: Worth Saving, or the hell with it? Young describes a former U.S. National Security Council operative named Flynt Leverett who wants to be "middleman" in a collaboration with Syria, which he thinks we should cozy up with.

Most of the article then goes on to look at the interference of Syria in Lebanon and the fact that the "dead hand" of the Syrian drives much that seems inexplicable in Lebanon, or which is blamed on other players.

In any case, Young concludes with a comment that gets to the heart of the State of Denial that exists in much of the West (particularly that in Europe and in the U.S. Democratic Party), that desperately wants to escape back to September 10, 2001:

What Flynt Leverett wouldn't admit was that while the so-called Cedar Revolution may have been romanticized, there was good reason to see it as something novel in the Middle East. For the first time, for example, several intelligence and security chiefs were forced out of office because of popular discontent. Place that against the grim order the Syrians and their Lebanese allies, notably the theocratic, authoritarian Hezbollah, seek to resurrect. Many in the West want to close the door on an Arab world that seems permanently overcome by its pathologies. Fine, but in abandoning a weak but genuine liberal system they are also abandoning a part of themselves.