Note of Caution

The triumphal procession seems to have started. Mark Steyn declares " The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled", while
Hitch has declared the "Arab Street" dead - at least in for use as a rhetorical club against the west.

The more I think about it, I'm not so sure.

Don't get me wrong; I'm praying for democracy in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East.

But remember - Syria is controlled by Ba'athists. They've watched the demise of their Ba'ath cousins in Iraq. A decade ago, you can bet they saw the fall of the Eastern Bloc. I'd suspect that Ceaucescu's end made an impression.

As we've seen in Fallujah, the Ba'athists are not big on relinquishing power without a fight.

Nor are most dictators. So while the weak Bashar Al-Assad dithers with the notion of weakening his position in Lebanon, the west wonders who really is in power in Syria. In most such dictatorships, power is a delicate balance between the party, the secret police and the military. Which of the three least wants to see itself lined up against the wall by some future, hypothetical Syrian democratic court?

Dictators can't afford to be seen as weak; not so much by the people as by the troika that holds them up in power.

I got to thinking about this the other day. We saw this happening several times during the Cold War. In Hungary and Poland in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in 1980 - pro-liberalization protests broke out, and in most cases were brutally subdued.

We all recall the fall of the Wall, and watching the USSR disintegrate. Not all of us remember that not even Gorbachev could afford to leave the helm without a fight. Remember the Vilnius TV station? The Soviets stormed the station when the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) tried to assert its independence. Gorbachev and the Politburo realized that to to allow even one "republic", even a tiny one like any of the Baltics (which had their own histories - they were independent nations from 1918 until 1940) to flake away would open the floodgates. As, indeed, happened.

Now, if Gorbachev - with his international image and a fair assurance that his landing would not involve a case of 9mm flu - wasn't above fighting to forestall democracy, what of the Syrian Ba'athists, who like their Iraqi cousins have nothing to lose, who would likely be torn to pieces by the people they've slaughtered over the decades?

I'll believe the'll leave Lebanon peacefully when I see it, and hope I'm wrong.