In what some will think irony and others historical instruction, Iraqis brought Saddam Hussein before a judge and accepted by plebiscite the very covenant of rule by consent that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad refused Lebanon when he ordered, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis all but confirmed, the murder of Rafiq Hariri. As the last votes cast in the constitutional referendum were being tallied and the Tikriti gangster stood in court, refusing to announce his own name, Mehlis released as United Nations chief investigator a report charting dictatorial subversion of liberal polity.

Victory in Iraq is nearly complete. It was rescued by the brave Iraqi stand in April 2004 and ensured by the January 2005 National Assembly election. Yes, the country's regular business was halted for the referendum, as with the Assembly vote — but a country beset by driven killers faces extraordinary times. And as most security measures were carried out by Iraqi forces, Iraq will soon be able to handle the extraordinary. From some there is the turbid prediction that Iraq will spend the next decades variolate with provincial skirmishes and urban bombings — unsteadily gaining its feet, more Kashmir than India, unable to completely stamp out terrorism.

That can't be. In the 1970s and 1980s non-state authoritarians known as terrorists operated in relative freedom, often enjoying the same Soviet auspices as their Near East government sponsors (or rivals). They prospered in a nebulous region of the wide, wide Cold War world, but for 1979 Tehran and 1983 Beirut going about their murderous work quietly. Through the last decade of the 20th Century, democratic states overlooked burgeoning terrorism in favor of threats from established dictatorships. In the general, now that terrorists and states guilty of their effluence are primary targets, survival means less time and attention to metastasis. And that is notwithstanding the damage they are continually taking. In the particular, when a country like Ba'athist Syria is importing Allied soldiers and diasporic liberals it cannot possibly continue exporting thugs and fanatics.

All of this is contingent on military and diplomatic prosecution. It calls for a review of the Bush doctrine, that the free world will make no distinction between terrorists and state sponsors; or, according to Bush's inaugural speech corollary, authoritarianism in all forms. Syria is an enemy of the United States and its allies. Syrians wish to be free. In mid-October the Aspen Institute's Jeff Gedmin met with Syrian exiles, led by Farid Ghadry of the Reform Party of Syria, in Paris. What did the three dozen exiles think? "Damascus is ready for meltdown." Western academics recoil at the tangled mess a fallen house of Assad would surely leave behind but Ghadry and his fellows know better — there is no such thing as a dictatorship built on honesty, faith and merit. Congress and the White House will make the decision of what exactly is to be done with Syria. But an end to terrorist invaders in Iraq and elsewhere, fulfillment of the "forward strategy of freedom": that road leads to Damascus.

Where is the left? Another event added to the confluence is, today, the number of American dead after nearly three years of Operation Iraqi Freedom rising to just 500 shy of the sum of young soldiers killed in Northern France on June 6, 1944. The message from Democrats has been mixed — which is to say, capitulatory or blithering. On Capitol Hill, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy begged for US "extrication" from the conflict spilling, as West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd put it, "too much blood." Congressman George Miller of the Democratic Policy Committee attempted to shatter the law of non-contradiction through the use of high-speed bullet points, furnishing a plan that included depriving Iraqis an alliance with the country responsible for actually giving them the choice; replacing monies directed to political parties (i.e., democrats) with monies for what he called "democracy assistance for independent growth" (i.e., anyone); and resolving to protect Iraq against terrorists shuttled through Syria and Iran by moving "several thousand" troops back to Kuwait.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently visited Central Asia — the "Stans" — and in seeking more solid ties with the former Soviet republics she implored each nation's government to defend, rather than hold captive, its people. A National Public Radio broadcast on the event played a brief excerpt of the secretary's remarks. Just in case Ms. Rice's statement inspired anyone, the NPR announcer reminded listeners that when the secretary departed Kazakhstan was still being run by a strongman.

That is the left — if you doubt it for a moment simply examine mainstream reporting and opinion columns, or other leftist forums. America is condemned for looking on while a population is violated by a dictatorship, condemned for gently pressuring reform in that dictatorship, condemned for militarily initiating or assisting a forceful native liberalization of that dictatorship; and, finally, condemned for presiding over the once-oppressed population's difficult withdrawal from an unbroken tradition of dictatorship. The allegation shape-shifts but stably orbits a conviction of American culpability.

Sadly, the twin examples of Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough to preclude equivocation from those who will make no inference of universality. Progressives can expect to hear how Syria is not like Iraq, nor Iran; and how the suggestion of military exertion to liberate either is not only distasteful but inconsistent, since the policy does not extend to Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, where the White House has chosen diplomacy to effect reform. The debate will go on and on, democratists hounded by the contention of the left.

But should the war proceed favorably, and the Near East liberalizes with the miraculous peripety of Eastern Europe, bringing quick, consecutive ends to dictators who have for years served the left's ad hominem tu quoque against American moralism, the matter becomes crystalline. There will no longer be another way, a should've-could've from the Democratic Party, since the Bush doctrine's medium-term objectives will have been met. The question to opponents of intervention shall then be: Do you support the unconditional advance and concord of democratic sovereignty through the eradication of tyranny? — do you believe men must be free?

Well, do you?

Late last month Freedom House released a report celebrating a brief modern history of democratic achievement through popular reason and intellect alone. In a publication entitled "How Freedom is Won: From Civic Struggle to Durable Democracy," the organization has quantified successful liberalization in sixty-seven countries over thirty years as validation of non-violent struggle, the kind of "people power" billions have witnessed from Asia to Africa to the Americas to the old Eastern Bloc; and more recently in the Revolutions Rose, Orange and Cedar by Georgians, Ukrainians and Lebanese.

Freedom House's keystone is its "civic coalition," an entity of free association and itself a right that must be recaptured from governmental expropriation. The report is a gushing endorsement of neither satyagraha nor ambivalence: Freedom House's two caveats hold that, first, authoritarians will offer less than what organized people must take from them; and second, that the rule of strength must be at least partially mitigated before any democratic gains can be made. Freedom House's preferences are spelled out in its recommendations to policymakers in free countries with phrases like "collapse of authoritarian rule," "aid," "pressure," "support," and "resistance." That freedom requires self-reliance does not mean struggling people ought to do everything for themselves.

Specific and timely exertion of force or diplomacy must be understood and their mutual uses defended. The war on terror, the concept of democratization, the sacrifices of military liberation and the patient diligence of diplomatic liberalization have been resisted by the left and the Democratic Party when not outright reviled. Caught between a yet-unconquerable enmity for George W. Bush and a moral compass that is both relativistic and obsolete, opponents of the war and otherwise popular war policies have tread a strange course that has often defied repute and, as domestic political stakes have risen only to be won by President Bush and the right, stumbled into sociopathy. Last July the Democratic Party's own presidential convention brought an elder senator forward to compare a sitting president to elemental fear; that was followed by an offer for Americans to trade one soldier's life for that of twenty thousand Iraqis; and then a public bitterness on the victory side of Iraqi National Assembly elections, as if the triumph of freedom in the midst of violence and uncertainty had been at the left's expense. All of this came across television, print and webstream to scores of nations — including Iraqis, who were free men and no longer some black-on-white statistic, and could finally listen and hear their dehumanization.

Charles Rangel, Congressman from New York, particularly derisive of Third World freedom on First World dime, has now placed Iraqi democracy alongside the Holocaust. Given the choice between distant parallels, Saddam Hussein's twenty-five years of extermination and a difficult first years against Hussein's would-be Islamist successors, Rangel reached over those two and picked American intervention. Any explanations will be worthless, save those delineating Mr. Rangel as a common racist or a more focused, anti-Arab bigot. He is not serious; if Americans were more confident in their convictions the man would be out of office by next Monday. But Rangel is not unique and should not be confused with those who sincerely believe in appealing to conscience, where a legitimate conversation must be had.

Ahmad at weblog Iraqi Expat speaks as one who knows exactly what once prevented the Iraqi people from forming their "civic coalition," namely the gangster state of Saddam Hussein:

I have seen the wars, though not the last one; I have lived in Iraq during the sanctions; I have been afraid all of my life of any government official and the lowest rank police officer who I have to thank and apologise to if he decides to slap me and spit on my face. I simply lost hope. I used to think that Saddam [could] be toppled by the people, by an assassination or a revolution; but I was dreaming. It would never have happened, and even if it would, a new dictator would have came a long just like 1958, 1963 and 1968. Otherwise, Qussay would have been next.

...Freedom and democracy doesn't come free and dreams take us nowhere. We may not succeed, but that is our problem; and as Kanan Makiya said, "The war made it possible for the country to have a chance — I am not saying a guarantee — of moving ahead in a democratic fashion".

Terrorism in Iraq is aberrant to the democratic process: it aspires to no coherent ideology and it is foreign where not comprised of former regime agents who fully embraced criminal activity when the pretense of civil authority was brought down by Allied soldiers. The Iraqi politic is moderate to progressive on matters of liberty. Yet the Iraqi civic coalition contends with an authority slow to accept its place among free men: the international right, harried by the left and its characters like Charlie Rangel, still trudges along with a lack of confidence in democratic values and their exportation.

Two countries whose tyrannical regimes are currently attacking Iraq and the Allies, Iran and Syria, have their own diasporas and dissidents living in frustration — ready to form their civic coalitions but prevented from doing so by a sufficient measure of violence and intimidation. To further liberalism and bring the end of this war and all others nearer, we have three obligations: rejecting the crass left; contributing to transitional movements; and considering Ahmad's dilemma, whether in certain circumstances the example set forth by Freedom House can only be followed when we begin with the force of arms.

Trade me just fifteen of the former for two thousand of the latter.

Free elections will be held in one month. Michael Totten, in Lebanon, sees total victory. He is justified to believe that, though the Cedar Revolution's clarion will ring far beyond Beirut, far longer than the tiny country's reclamation. The devil's lost dearly: this is a triumph for the entire balance of human freedom.

At a press briefing yesterday, State Department Deputy Spokesman Adam Ereli announced that Washington was "look[ing] forward to receiving," even if one week late, the United Nations assessment on Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. As with the international body's untactfully forthright implication of Bashar Assad's regime and Lebanese quislings with the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, one wonders if the Bush administration knows, UN obscurantism and all, what must be coming:

Syria has not withdrawn a significant part of its intelligence presence in Lebanon, undermining its claim Tuesday to have ended its 29-year intervention in its western neighbor, U.S., European and U.N. officials said. ...U.N. member states and the Lebanese opposition have told the United Nations that Syrian military intelligence has taken up new positions "in the south of Beirut and elsewhere, and has been using headquarters of parties affiliated with the government of Syria as well as privately rented apartments for their purposes," said a report Annan made to the Security Council and released Tuesday.

"Five thousand" is one of the head counts from official channels, matching the claim published by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Seyassah two weeks ago. Of course no one is surprised: in Syrian behavior there is the compulsion found in any authority that rules through strength. Damascus' policies are functions of acquiring and subjugating, a claw and mouth every which way. But there are spies and browbeaters that haven't left; and four targeted explosions have gone off over the past weeks, killing and injuring innocent Lebanese. What has always concerned the Cedar Revolution's leaders and protectors is the deviation principle in acts of violence. That physical threat is taken seriously:

The United States is counting on a new U.N. verification team sent to Lebanon this week to investigate Syria's intelligence presence and to provide "a considered judgment" that will "inform our deliberations" at the Security Council. If Syria does not comply, Washington and Paris may propose punitive steps, Ereli said.

America and Europe's consignation of Syria's Ba'athists to a category of the barbaric and single-minded is remarkable, an apparent diplomatic excommunication. Rehabilitation of or reconciliation with Syria is not a concern, certainly not now. Washington and Paris view Damascus from Beirut's perspective; the more they see of Syria, the farther they will push the regime into isolation. Badgered by at least one journalist with obvious sympathies for Hafez Assad's stepwise invasion of his neighbor, Adam Ereli spoke at a press briefing yesterday almost exclusively in terms of Lebanese independence. The spokesman did so in a few exchanges, this last one the most striking:

QUESTION: Now that the Syrians are complying or seemingly complying, just two questions, Adam. Aren't you — let me give you the question totally from an Arab world point of view. Aren't you surprised to how fast the Syrians complied? Because even the Lebanese were asking for this withdrawal. It never came. We had to have what we had, and then we're facing it now. And then joining the question maybe of a future normalization, are you — how fast can the U.S. go back to normal relations with Syria, now that we have an official withdrawal?

MR. ERELI: I don't want to predict next steps we might take diplomatically, just because I think that's premature. As far as are we surprised at how fast it happened, I think we're pleased that the events — we're pleased that events have developed the way they've developed. We're pleased that Syria has withdrawn its forces from Lebanon. As I said before, this is an important step. It's not the end of the road. It needs to be verified. But it does mark a positive development certainly in the affairs of Lebanon and certainly for the people of Lebanon.

...

QUESTION: Adam, just a follow-up on that question? You've used a lot of language — "historic step, important step, positive step" — in regards to Lebanon. Are you not willing to say that this might also be an important step towards the normalization of relations between the United States and Syria if the Syrians would —

MR. ERELI: Well, you know, again, I don't want to — you're making it sound like our relations with Syria are not normalized. I mean, the fact that we've recalled our Ambassador for consultations is — does not mean we don't have a diplomatic presence, does not mean we're not engaged regularly with the Government of Syria, does not mean that we don't have normal relations. It is a step we took because that's what we thought was appropriate and called for and necessary at the time. But one should be under no misapprehension that we can't conduct business, the business we need to conduct with the Government of Syria with — in the context of our present relationship. So you're asking me, where are we going with Syria — and everybody's asked in a different way — where are we going to go with Syria as a result of this step? I can't tell you. I don't know.

Ereli probably does but owes nothing more to his questioners than they already know: one month ago the Bush administration quite visibly extended a hand to Syrian democratists in exile. In one ear we hear that the White House sees no future in the Assad regime and in the other we're told that one of the first steps of a post-Iraq operation in regime change President Bush will require is a solid foundation of umbrella groups equipped to help democratize with local familiarity and liberalist experience that American troops and the oppressed native populace could never, repspectively, provide as quickly or as reliably. Suddenly Bashar Assad's worth is a measure of how little he will obstruct Lebanese, then Syrian, freedom.

The chaos from any violence against the Cedars is what keeps Ereli modest. Even Condoleezza Rice has cautioned against "speculation" and trying to "predict" events, but anyone wise makes for a safe journey to an intended destination.

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.

Mainstream press agencies are reliably, if insensibly, carrying abroad the Syrian imputation that the three car bombs intended for independence demonstrators reflect on the Lebanese themselves. The presumption is in repetitious narratives that spare all parties but Lebanon itself for the civil war enabling Hafez Assad's slow constriction of the modest country. But for all the "chaos" and "turmoil" and "fears" from self-appointed wailers of Lebanon's "plunging" to the violent depths of its oppressor, the Cedar Revolution has faced down intimidation and murder while enduring weeks of political arm-wrestling. Prevented early on from simply flattening the telegenic uprising, Bashar Assad has been forced to test 20th-Century Arab fascism under conditions for which it was not intended and has discovered that it is, like any dolled-up thuggery, a method over ninety-nine parts per cent fear and killing, cinched up with just a bit of picked-over quackery. And not working for him.

Nine days ago Bashar Assad was secure enough in a lull. His puppet government in Beirut could still check the pro-democracy opposition, almost in spite of the Cedars' matched enthusiasm and anger. Two car bombs had gone off in Christian neighborhoods, hurting and then killing people, with no sharp reaction from Washington or the rest of the world. A few thousand Syrian troops had since left Lebanon; most remained encamped in the Bekaa Valley. Damascus didn't have much to help preserve its rule in Lebanon, least of all support or sympathy or a reasonable doubt as to its intentions, but was quietly granted a dictatorship's initiative to brutality and deceit. When Bashar Assad said he'd "would rather break Lebanon over the heads" of Lebanese patriots than give up his father's prize, it was to Rafiq Hariri — dead six weeks now.

Two days later, Thursday, March 24, whatever Damascus was planning would have been raked from the table. Most observers were shocked by the firmness and clarity of a United Nations probe into Hariri's murder, released that day. Reason magazine's Michael Young wrote in his now well-read account that "it is an indictment of the Syrian-dominated order in Lebanon. And...it is a proposal to dismantle that order." Who killed Hariri? Under Chief investigator, UN Deputy Police Commissioner Peter Fitzgerald, the report put it this way: Syria and its Lebanese appendages were the most capable of the murder and the most culpable for providing the killers their opportunity. Even if a crack demolition commando unit of Maronite Nuns had cut the former prime minister down, Fitzgerald's team found that reports of crime scene neglect were correct. And nobody suspected nuns.

Reuters got one right with a Friday headline reading "Lebanese Officials on Back Foot Over U.N. Report." Beirut's Assad cronies accepted the international probe they'd rejected a month before just as the Cedars demanded, again, for the government's "security chiefs" to resign. Syria was suddenly forced to contend with a furious Lebanese population, a glowering free world, a skeptical neutral world and an impending probe that meant to uncover much more than Fitzgerald had. A third car bomb did nothing to shake the Cedars. Commentary on Hezbollah and civil war paused for most everyone to wonder how on earth Bashar Assad thought he'd get away with all this.

Patrick Fitzgerald has a respectful professional record as investigator, though not such a particular one that the White House's public diplomacy with Syria might have been tempered through most of March because the Bush administration anticipated the incredible advantage the Cedar Revolution would gain from the United Nations indicting Damascus. But what once seemed a puzzling deference to Syria's attempt to capsize international cooperation may have been the time needed for Washington to deploy its own team of sappers. Beginning Saturday, March 26 a Saudi newspaper, then the Washington Post reported American interlocution with Syrian dissident groups; in the Post story Jacques Chirac was said to have predicted, in effect, Lebanon's independence to shatter Syria into a hundred political parties, ready for democratic elections. By Tuesday, umbrella groups were speaking to reporters. Monsieur Chirac may have been repeating the obvious. Said Farid Ghadry's Reform Party of Syria:

[T]he call for democracy in Syria is a matter that is being taken seriously at the highest levels of the (George W.) Bush administration. ...Like the majority of Lebanese who are no longer afraid, soon most Syrians will drown the voices of the government-supported opposition. ...Democracy is the common denominator uniting all Syrians, no matter what their political or religious views are.

It's now that we can suggest a turning point for events that have transformed what was a steady course to victory in Lebanon in the short term only into a force that, if indeed guided by Washington, could fell the last Ba'athists. Condoleezza Rice is featured prominently in this ninth exchange; when domestic critics called Rice a "loyalist" during her installation process, even they might have underestimated how startlingly fast the State Department would come about and begin working in earnest for progressive rightists. The Bush administration has since late 2001 valued diplomacy with belligerents on its success with disarmament and not placation. Colin Powell's Foggy Bottom was a sort of second Congress, blunting directives and forcing the White House to act as sole executive, sometimes holding the team's reins from inside the coach. How many times did Powell's agency meet with Syrian dissident groups in broad daylight — even without the Iraqi ballot victory? Condoleezza Rice even confided to reporters the difficulty of keeping pace with an event sequence she had no intention of slowing. "We're going to look at all the possibilities and talk to as many people as we possibly can," she said. Nobody wants to be blindsided, was her cautionary, perhaps knowing that her predecessor's department was routinely ambushed by stationary objects — Bashar Assad's Syria one of them. No, sappers have been digging under Damascus' surly walls; "predict" is Rice's word, which could mean charges have been or will soon be laid, to be set off by liberty's torch.

Lebanon's revolution is glowing. In Beirut, proxy Prime Minister Omar Karami has said that having found no acceptable coalition cabinet he might resign again. Fine, the opposition's answered; take your president and brownshirt heads with you, and don't touch that election calendar. Journalists meanwhile have found it possible to report on Syria's sly reinsertion of a fifth column in Lebanon, not two weeks after Damascus conspicuously withdrew its intelligence services. Having bungled what he couldn't help, Bashar Assad has made clear to the world what it might have been satisfied only to suspect.

At least he's consistent.

Lebanon commentary this evening. If you haven't been following yourself, today's Belmont Club is an excellent crossroads for what's been on observer's minds.

The Western melody is irresistably brought back to its root chord by the dominant chord, a major triad based on the perfect fifth of the scale; in Baroque and Classical the progression of chords to a perfect cadence, V-I, is so consistent as to be gracefully mathematical. The V-chord's diatonic suggestion can be pressed by the addition of a note set a minor third above the major triad, the major fourth of the scale known as a dominant seventh — the seventh slips to three, the third and fifth merge to one, the base an unswerving dominant spire, all in effortless resolution.

The dominant chord can also be garnished with a minor sixth above the dominant base, the minor third of the scale. Those unfamiliar with theory would instantly recognize the sound of this last chord, more by picture than ear, a window into high-life club flash and pizzazz of the Twenties: in a word, the Yiddish tag for contrived sentimentality, schmaltz. George Gershwin's 1924 masterpiece Rhapsody in Blue has its dominant sevenths ridden with that sixth, and it may be that one is inclined to think the piece criminally overplayed on commercial television and radio because schmaltz is strictly a convention, that of specific and narrow use; the modified dominant has really nowhere else to take the music but the root, and always with a big, stupid grin on its face. It comes and goes with little surprise.

A strongman is hardly music, certainly not beauty; but he is formulaic and with only a brief account of history quite predictable. Most authoritarians are tactically inclined, most comfortable with the physical realm and the reality of brute force to conquer, take and possess. A few are strategic but even the most wily, like the Third Reich's demented architect, who weaved about Germany's aristocrats and bureaucrats and militarists to tie the Weimar Republic's noose, telegraph their intentions by word or deed and — compelled by an animal nature — do not much deviate. If the devil calls the torment and domination of men art, he judges it by how well a predator can conceal himself and his intentions, and deceive both his adversaries and his dinner.

So it follows that the work of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, an imitator of a dead movement, is stilted and traced and punk; comedic, maybe, if it weren't responsible for and capable of so much suffering.

The presentation of a United Nations probe into the Valentine's Day bombing assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri is a little behind but few doubt that at least one of Lebanon's illegitimate power brokers, Syria or its terrorist client Hezbollah, was directly responsible. Swept to their feet by the murder of an admired man and motivated by the success of peaceful assembly from Ukraine to Iraq, the Lebanese began demonstrations as massive as they were determined — too quickly and too loudly for Damascus to stamp out. The world had long been waiting on Syria to release its tiny neighbor, and with the Near East an egg cracking open for a newborn Bashar Assad was faced with an order carrying potential consequences for the first time.

Enter the plodding choreography of the unoriginal despot: stall, obfuscate, intimidate, lie and beg to a stiff and awkward rhythm. We've seen the ply-off; the parley; the refusal; the grudging half-step; the backhand; the backstab; the whimper and the hiss. After five weeks and seven exchanges with the world's major power and its French ally, Bashar Assad is as good as one can be in a rut, apparently safe from imminent collapse but with no clear way of keeping his stolen Lebanon. He's succeeded in evading a schedule for withdrawing some ten thousand Syrian troops from the neighboring country, most recently changing last week's promise to United Nations envoy Terje Roed-Larsen of a timetable within days to something of the kind as late as April. The bait-and-switch, done with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's nod of assent, might be troubling if Washington's May deadline for withdrawal weren't so palpably immutable. The White House's lowered voice these days seems less resignation than a desire to avoid wasting capital on a loser. Beirut's puppet government plays defense, explaining to the world why neither President Emile Lahoud nor Prime Minister nominee Omar Karami should be shown the door while a resolute, broad-based opposition has not conceded an inch, thumping the butts of its pitchforks on the ground in steady time. Assad adjunct Hezbollah tried and failed to win the battle of Martyrs' Square, and while it is suspected that the terrorist group is turning to its most comfortable methods of public persuasion.

From Beirut to Brussels, to Washington to Secretariat in New York, few doubt Syria will not go quietly nor buck at the first relaxation of the free world's grip — yet a sense of inevitability to Lebanese independence pervades. As Dave Frum intoned three weeks ago, "it's a war the United States can and must win."

And on comes Syria's next set of ploys; the eighth exchange. It was reported that Damascus hoped to try again where it failed two weeks ago, and assemble a chorus of despot capitals at the Arab summit in Algeria today to match against the Washington-led alliance protecting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution. No luck: press out of Algiers today told a story of no-shows and confusion, as much a sign of the crumbling dictatorial order as Bashar Assad's folly to hide behind it. According to one paper, Jordan's Abdullah, absent from the meeting, took an opportunity to further expose Damascus.

Lebanon's Cedars began bracing for Syrian violence as soon as they took to public protest. But even as bulletins report tonight that a second bomb has with at least one dead inaugurated Damascus' murderous reformation many suspected, the speed and audacity with which House Assad idols have been ripped down by Lebanese hands speak of an inner strength that, matched with Washington's resolve, is impervious to bloodshed.

Syria's played out: it has only polemy and polemics, stale rhetoric that circles endlessly in the mid-20th-Century fantasia of anti-semitic, Hegelian Pan-Arabism. Israel this; Great Satan that. The farce has shown in the public square, and badly. The litany of old slogans no longer engenders; and may not even reassure. But Bashar Assad's henchmen are so tone-deaf they haven't realized how unintelligible their fascist dogma is to this age.

The Cedar Revolution is precisely today's motif, a separation from Lebanon's history. Frances Z. Brown, an American teacher in Beirut, writes that her students are savvy to the information age broadcasting botht their plight and vigor, and are no longer a party to Bashar Assad's rule of force:

After the shocking assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri last month, the anti-Syria movement has become big, brash and unapologetic. "Why should we be afraid of Syria now?" one protest organizer in Martyrs' Square asked me. "The world is watching us on television."

At the international school where I now teach, I've come to expect that a mini-rally may erupt at any moment among my sixth-graders, who largely come from wealthy, educated Lebanese families. A usually reticent student bounds into class one day exclaiming, "Miss, I'm proud to be Lebanese!" He summons public speaking skills I'd never seen in him before and begins addressing the class: "Freedom! Sovereignty! Independence!" It's nearly impossible to get this bunch to do anything simultaneously (I should know), yet my student's outburst inspires an impassioned and united response. He takes advantage of the soapbox to intone, "We must disarm Hezbollah, or they will cause another civil war, and we must make peace with Israel." I gasp; the sixth grade applauds in unison.

What Heaven conceives hell can only fake; the Cedars thrive on a spontaneity and elan Syria's drab columns are forced to mimic, but only a bit, lest they stray from the party rehearsal. It's a pitiful match, utterly in the Cedars' favor, made unpredictable only by Syria's bestial will. The world knows what old tripe Bashar Assad has to offer from today until his inevitable fall — terrorism, propaganda, suppression, ruin, and nothing else.

Damascus certainly has had delivered the excuse it would want to bring the jackboots back tenfold:

Emile Lahoud, Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, has invited anti-Syrian opposition and loyalist politicians to begin immediate talks after a car bomb raised fears of a return to the country's violent past. The blast wounded several people in a Christian suburb of eastern Beirut, gutting the ground and first floors of a residential block and destroying nearby cars.

In a statement, Mr Lahoud's office said: "The president affirms the need for such a dialogue meeting starting today in any place they agree on, including the presidential palace, which will keep its doors open."

Familiar work. A little explosion to prod the opposition into breaking their vows?

That God might prevail on an absolute ruler to remove himself from the throne of his own volition is so incredible a miracle it is no more than perfection's brief appeal to obdurate mortal nature, and for the sake of lives imperiled in the meantime not an intervention to be sought.

The Lebanese have victory — but must hold on tight. And they need the free world's help.

Revolution carried across the world on all frequencies can be most easily translated:

Inspired by developments in Lebanon, where Syrian troops have begun a phased withdrawal under pressure, Georgia is stepping up efforts to get Russia to pull out troops from two remaining bases it maintains in the former Soviet republic.

...On March 10, Georgian lawmakers voted to give Russia until Jan. 1, 2006 to close the bases. They said the two governments should agree by May 1 on "a concrete withdrawal timetable that is well-considered and acceptable to Georgia," failing which the Georgian government should by May 15 draw up a list of measures to take in response.

President Bush stood with the Georgian people in their 2003 Revolution of the Roses. "Good friend" in demure usurper Vladimir Putin or not, this former Soviet state is worth White House succor.