I have a friend that just got back from Iran, and she told me the same thing the editor of USA was saying lastnight on CSPAN when she was being invterviewed by the owner. Especially among the students, the elections in Iraq have had a huge mental impact on Iran. Everyone is talking about the fact that Iran had its first parliamentary elections in 1906 and now the backward Arabs in Iraq are ahead of them. Everyone complaining to eachother that Iran has fallen behind. IN addition, the students love it every time Bush talks "tough" to the Iranian government because they believe (probably wrongly) that every time the US acts tough the chances for them getting more freedom improves.
If the Iraqi elections are influencing Iran, they have to be having some impact in Lebanon.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I'll say the same thing I posted last week when you told me Bush set a new "tone": I haven't seen any actual reporting suggesting that what happened in Iraq has influenced what happened in Lebanon. Inside the Beltway, among people who spent more time watching the President's last State of the Union speech than they have spent in their entire lifetimes trying to understand Lebanese history or politics, it may be taken as a given that Mr. Bush and the Iraqi people are responsible for all the good that transpires in Lebanon. Whoop de do.
Elections are not new to Lebanon. And what you have there is not exactly a groundswell for representative democracy, except among the Hezbollah supporters who would like to have representation proportionate to their numbers -- something your "pro-democracy" Maronites and Druze have opposed.
If our invasion of Iraq made a difference, I suggest the difference is that Syria feels exposed now in a way that it did not before, and feels compelled to withdraw its forces as a result. That is a good thing -- one hopes, unless the Lebanese start killing each other again, which is what was happening when a Republican administration with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense invited Syrian troops into the country -- that results from the invasion. But it doesn't have much to do with Hallmark-card-grade sentiment about democracy.
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