Teheri’s Take on Lebanese People Power

I have long been an admirer of Amir Teheri’s political commentary. He is one of the more lucid and politically sharp Mid East pundits writing in the English Press today. Today’s New York Post column does not disappoint:

Hariri's murder has ended elite politics by bringing into the picture a new element. That element is people power, the same force that swept away the totalitarian regimes of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and, more recently, led Ukraine into a second liberation.

Over the decades, Syria has become a master in the art of manipulating the Lebanese political elite. It has promoted its clients within each religious community and, practicing divide and rule, set one community against another. Whenever faced with a particularly tenacious adversary, it has used murder as the weapon of last resort.

In that context, it has killed dozens of "troublemakers," including two elected presidents of Lebanon, one Grand Mufti of Sunni Muslims, a paramount leader of the Druze community, several parliamentarians and a number of editors and publishers. The time-tested policy worked each time because Lebanon's politics remained confined to the elites — a sort of aristocracy that feared the power of the people almost as much as it loathed the Syrians.

Hariri's murder, however, has triggered the law of unintended consequences. It has put the people center stage and forced the political aristocrats to abandon their tradition of double-talk and petty calculations. The genie of people power has come out of the bottle and no amount of political chicanery will send it back in. Nor can Syria dispatch its tanks to crush the demonstrators on the streets of Beirut as the Soviet Union did in Prague in 1968.

"This is the start of Lebanon's second war of independence," says parliamentarian Marwan Hamade. "We are determined that Hariri's tragic death be transformed into the rebirth of our nation." Those who have wondered where next the flame of freedom may rise in the Middle East have their answer. After free and fair elections in Iraq, it is now the turn of Lebanon to break the shackles of tyranny and take the path of democracy.

{...}

Free elections in Lebanon, after free elections in the Palestinian Authority and Iraq, will speed up the dismantling of other despotic regimes in the Middle East, thus bringing this vital region into the mainstream of post-Cold War global politics. Whether anyone likes it or not, regime-change must remain the name of the game in the region until people-based governments are established wherever this is not already the case.

Regime-change, however, need not be pursued solely through military means (although this must not be discarded). In countries where internal mechanisms for peaceful change exist, the task facing the major democracies is to help trigger them into action. Today, Lebanon is one such case. Any failure to seize the moment would amount to a betrayal of the democratic aspirations of the Lebanese people.

Indeed.

(tipped off by Instapundit)