Hugh Hewitt notes that Ed Kilgore, filling in yesterday for Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scoffs at the notion that the Cedar Revolution this week in Lebanon has anything to do with the Bush administration:

But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.

This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

I warned that this would be the Left's reaction to being so wrong about the forward strategy of democratization to end Islamofascist terrorism. They simply would refuse to acknowledge reality and claim that the entire effort would just be a huge coincidence. Fortunately, as Hugh notes, Kilgore gave us a standard of proof, one that Kilgore would have known had already been met had he paid any attention to the story at all. David Ignatius's Washington Post column from February 23rd has this assessment from one of the Lebanese democracy activists:

The leader of this Lebanese intifada [for independence from Syria] is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria's occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud. The old slogans about Arab nationalism turned to ashes in Jumblatt's mouth, and he and Hariri openly began to defy Damascus...

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

So here we have a Muslim in Lebanon, normally inclined towards skepticism towards George Bush, giving Bush the credit for sparking the Cedar Revolution through the liberation of Iraq.

Paging Ed Kilgore ... reality on Line 2. Please answer.

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Tracked on March 2, 2005 6:43 PM