The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal writes (in their unsigned editorial) that President George Bush’s world view is affecting positive change in a previously hopeless part of the world—the middle east. They offer all sorts of suggestions to help push it along even further, but in so doing makes me wonder if they were at his inaugural speech or his State of the Union speech.
He’s already on it, as I see it.
Walid Jumblatt is not the sort to be described as a friend of the United States, much less of the Bush Administration. In November 2003, the Druze leader and Lebanese parliamentarian described Paul Wolfowitz as a “virus” and regretted that the Deputy Defense Secretary hadn’t been killed in a terrorist rocket strike on his Baghdad hotel the month before. So it says something about the changing face of Middle East politics that Mr. Jumblatt seems to have converted to Mr. Wolfowitz’s way of thinking.
“It’s strange for me to say this,” he recently told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, “but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing.”
As, it seems, do the Lebanese. There were mass demonstrations in Beirut last week following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. That was to be expected—a fitting tribute to the man who rebuilt Beirut from the rubble. What’s remarkable is that the demonstrations haven’t stopped. […]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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