Finally. Credit Where Credit Is Due

Robert Fisk:

In reality, the “Arab awakening” began not in Tunisia this year, but in Lebanon in 2005 when, appalled by the assassination of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri (Saad’s father), hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths gathered in central Beirut to demand the withdrawal of Syria’s 20,000 soldiers in the country. […] Bachar made a pitiful speech in Damascus, abusing the demonstrators, suggesting that live television cameras were using “zooms” to exaggerate the number of the crowds. But the UN passed a resolution […] which forced the Syrian military to leave. This was the first “ousting” of a dictator, albeit from someone else’s country, by the popular Arab “masses” which had hitherto been an institution in the hands of the dictators.

Now that Assad became bad-dictator-du-jour, observers are suddenly remembering why we had a revolution 6 years ago.