Once again, the decent folks of Lebanon are flooding the streets, waving flags, and generally putting on a good impression of a respectable mass movement.
Estimates of the crowd are running from 800,000 to more than twice that. That's on the order of a quarter to half of the population!
There's much more over at Publius and National Review.
A total and hasty Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could prove inconvenient to Assad in many ways... one of which is bolstered by the recent report that Saddam's secret-weapon programs had, as the VRWC had been saying all along, been systematically dismantled and the materiel taken elsewhere ("Honest, he used to have that stuff! Clinton was right!"). Fingers have often been pointed at Syria, but, when the pointing gets specific, the usual suspected location has been the Bekaa Valley. "No, those weapons aren't in Syria! Not at all! They're, um, next door. In that little country we've been occupying for 30 years. Nothing to do with us!"
Meanwhile in Iraq, crowds have taken to the streets to protest a recent suicide bombing perpetrated by a Jordanian. Publius has more on this, and points to further detail from Natasha Tynes.
Update to the meanwhile: apparently the bomber wasn't a Jordanian after all; the Jordanian newspaper article that touched off the protests was garbled - Natasha has the followup.
Update on the stuff that might be in the Bekaa Valley: here's the original NYT article, and here Christopher Hitchins looks at the implications.
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