Like any strongman who twists an entire nation into a cynosure of self-declared greatness, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad had his portrait fixed in omnipresence from Damascus to captive Beirut when his father Hafez died in 2000. No one asked the Lebanese if they wished to see their foreign oppressor's ophthalmologist son in a paper-doll variety of poses and costumes every which way they looked, so when Syrian's talon-clutch began to ease last month, the defacing and outright destruction of authoritarian glamor shots followed.

Tomorrow Syrian troops officially depart in toto. Without question, the powers supporting and protecting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution doubt the sincerity of the world's last Ba'athists and the transnational body with a history more inclined to protecting the reigns of men like Assad than following its charter and overturning them. A mercurial force of some five thousand — over one-third the size of the Syrian army remainder ordered out of Lebanon two months ago — is said to remain alongside thousands of Damascus' imported work force, many of whom aided Hezbollah in its democratic playacting. Washington's faith in the multiply compromised United Nations leadership must have fallen further when Secretary General Kofi Annan stalled the release of a report verifying Syria's departure from Lebanon — at first look for no apparent reason but considering a recent, unusually objective United Nations report on the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri that implicated Damascene machination as directly as possible, Mr. Annan's complaisance with the worst of men is by far the most sensible explanation. And Hezbollah, thugs who enjoy dressing like good citizens, however cornered, remains coiled.

So the Lebanese rest in circumstances not too different from Iraqis several hundred miles to the east: at risk from an enemy that speaks only in violence and suppression but with a shared vision, ideal, and faith that has woven their many stripes together into one cord. There is no love for despots in this country, and many are wasting no time in broadly expressing as much:

As soon as the truckloads of Syrian soldiers had left for home, Mariam Majzoub started dishing out paint to erase the last vestiges of their 29-year presence. Her children, nephews, nieces and neighbors stuck Lebanese flags on top of the abandoned posts near her home in this tiny Bekaa Valley village, slapped whitewash on the walls and celebrated the departure date in green paint: "Independence 2005, Sunday, April 17."

"We started dancing in the street even before they turned the corner," said Majzoub, her plump face glowing with joy. "We could finally express ourselves, and there was nothing they could do about it."

While exiting Syrian agents pull down Assad avatars, sandblasting and demolishing signs of God-knows-what from their old lairs, army vehicles heading for the border have been observed to be stamped with posters of the iron-fisted eye doctor. It's meant to be a loser's puffing of the chest as he trudges home, at once a call to defiance and revenge, but has become another scene of Arab fascism's suffocation. Bashar Assad goes home in defeat. And home to what? Dissidents, no doubt invigorated by nine weeks of watching their illegitimate ruler stumble about:

Chanting "freedom, freedom," about 200 Syrians protested on Sunday outside a Damascus state security court where a prominent human rights campaigner accused of opposing the state was on trial. The area was sealed off by about 50 riot police as demonstrators, including many Kurds, carried posters of the defendants and banners denouncing the emergency law in force in Syria since the Baath Party took power in 1963.

More impressive, Michael Young has expounded on the perception that the Bush White House will finally bring its weight to bear on the glass jaw that is Damascus (hat tip, Tony):

The mood in the Bush administration is that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is not viable, perhaps even in the medium term, and that talk of gradual "reform" along the lines of what Assad and his acolytes have been trying to peddle abroad in the past four years is ridiculous in the current context. Worse for Assad, there seems little American fear that once he leaves or is made to leave office, Syria would be dominated by Islamists.

It should be no small consolation that the Lebanese are spared, by politics and geography, the brunt of Near East authoritarianism — terrorism and its insidious, inhuman bearing. Yet the unique yield of this country's mid-20th Century liberalism has provided its people with ample experience and temperament to win independence peacefully, to work atop the delicate scaffolding of reason and honor that sustains, unseen, the affairs of liberty. There is a miraculous divide where the bare friction of brute force has no power, its drivers forced into the court of civilized men. Flesh succumbs; virtue does not. Preserved by a free world committed to defend against Syrian imposition the Lebanese may have found it, and could succeed in defeating one tyrant most poetically: through victory they will cause Bashar Assad, in vanity, to destroy himself.

'ON THE DEFENSIVE': Wretchard sees the same.