Via the Corner, Farid Ghadry of the Reform Party of Syria continues where Walid Phares left off:

We expect more pressure on the Syrian regime that will weaken it further. Their biggest assets have been deployed for all of us to see while the United States has yet to deploy its arsenal to show the Ba'athists in Damascus our capabilities. The patience the President is showing is leading him down the path of a united and concerted effort by the US and Europe to destroy Ba'athism once and for all. We believe that the Syrian Ba'ath party is a terrorist party that must be dealt with swiftly. It is far richer, more organized, and still has a legitimate country from which it can fight democracy and freedom. The United States must know that if Ba'athism goes, so will Hezbollah's powers and possibly the Mullahs in Tehran who will be standing all alone in a sea of democracy.

One striking observation Phares made while talking to Brit Hume last night was that Syria's appropriation of liberal means, directly in Damascus and through Hezbollah in Beirut, could be viewed in this moment of Syrian decline not as audacity but desperation — that these authoritarians made twisted imitations precisely because the real thing worked for the rebelling Lebanese, caught instantly and elegantly on film and far superior to anything an old-fashioned, disjoined Ba'athist propaganda board could cook up. The British Telegraph narrates this Near Eastern duel of iconographic merchandise: T-shirts, stickers, posters for the Cedar democrats; grey ball caps, Mickey Mao-style, for the prodded Bashar-kateers. Revolutionaries believe the advantage is theirs:

[M]ost of the branding has been devised for [Hezbollah's] opponents, campaigning to drive 14,000 Syrian troops from their soil. This has been done by a core of young Lebanese advertising executives. "We are branding the revolution so people remember it," said one creator of the "Independence '05" slogan and campaign.

Not many can argue, regardless of their sympathies, which side's rallies have been easier on the eyes. Lebanon's stake goes far deeper than the public square, of course, but perception carries more mass to it in a young age of immediate, high-fidelity, far-flung broadcast; it is democratic revolution "Like You've Never Seen it Before." And the Cedar demonstrations have delineated a chasm profoundly separating a dictator's fakery from the instinctive, free-spirited popular uprising. Every opposition rally has been a resplendent cross-section of the country — young and old, man and woman. Hezbollah's managed happening was in pictures the archetypical, homogenous Near Eastern frenzied mass; Damascus' put-up the following day only slightly less rigid. Bashar Assad's bunch worshiped his bodily sempiternity while the Cedars honored the universal causes for which Rafiq Hariri fought. Syria's dead sea celebrated the whelm of collectivism by shouting "With our souls and blood we sacrifice ourselves for Assad," while the Lebanese forest embraced free will's self-sacrifice through "Freedom, sovereignty, independence!" The revolution is driven by human desire. Assad's fan club is mostly driven by roughneck. We can deduce, then, whose demonstrations can maintain tempo and win greater international sympathy as they continue.

That foreign acclaim is critical. As is the world's law, all civility rests on the means to wield greater force against those who would violently bereave it — something of which many Westerners are unaware, our means so incontestable. The lingering threat to the Cedar Revolution will be statist violence. Yet Bashar Assad is a predator who humors Beirut because he fears what is physically greater than he: that free world drawn in by the sight and inspiration of the Cedars and now fixed on the situation. Damascus cannot crush Lebanese independence so long as Washington's alliance pledges safekeeping and is taken at its word; that pledge stands if the Cedars keep the world's heart. Lebanon's patriots are well-armed for war by words, and may have lured Damascus into competition in free expression — tyranny's short suit. They must only hold off the entrance of brute strength through their tutelars, led by Washington.

UNSURPASSED: Via Robert Mayer, more on Independence Days 2005.