Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building

April 26, 2005: Syria pulls out of Lebanon.

Mark it on your calendars: the liberation of Afghanistan, the liberation of Iraq, and now the liberation of Lebanon.

I give Boy Assad until August to be setting up that opthamology practice on the Riviera.

Or be lying dead in the gutter in Damascus.

HEADSMACK! The ever hilarious Arab News editorializes on the pullout: Withdrawl from Lebanon a Major Blow

By meeting UN demands to pull out all its troops from Lebanon, Syria hopes to patch up its troubled relations with the West but the inglorious end to a costly three-decade-long deployment risks delivering a serious blow to the regime’s authority, analysts say.

“A humbling exit that could have been so different,” was how one dissident academic, political scientist Michel Kilo, described the withdrawal due to be completed today.

He recalled how Syria had repeatedly declined to withdraw its troops when it had the opportunity to do so of its own free will.

By failing to withdraw after Israel’s 2000 pullout from the south under fire from the Syrian-backed Hezbollah militia, the regime had missed the chance of a hero’s send-off.

Now the government needed to accept the “sea change” in the politics of its smaller neighbor and undertake not just a troop withdrawal but a “complete disengagement” from Lebanon, said Kilo.

A “new vision” of relations was needed for the two countries, which have never exchanged embassies amid a reluctance in Damascus to entirely abandon the claim of some nationalists to a Greater Syria.

The1950 s policy of “economic blockade” and the “military containment” of the past three decades had both been found wanting, he said.

To secure the hoped-for improvement in its international standing, the regime needed to make its relations with the European Union and the United States its “top priority” and “make all efforts necessary”.

European leaders have said they will only go ahead with a planned association agreement with Syria on the model of others signed with Mediterranean littoral states, if the government allows free and fair elections to be held in Lebanon by the end of May.

Syria does finally appear to be relaxing its long grip on Lebanese affairs.

Not only have the long-feared Syrian intelligence services closed their Beirut offices, but the Lebanese security apparatus they set up in their own image also appears to be crumbling.

Its central figure for the past seven years, Jamil Sayyed, stepped down yesterday citing “important changes in the policies” which had originally brought him to power.

It was a heavy price to pay for a regime that only last year was the final arbiter of Lebanese political life.

Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Salim Hoss, a longtime Syrian ally, said Damascus had only itself to blame for meddling so intensely in its neighbor’s affairs in recent years.

Writing in the Beirut daily As-Safir on Friday, he cited Syria’s “imposition” last year of a three-year extension to the term of office of its protege President Emile Lahoud and its “deplorable” reponse to last September’s UN Security Council resolution requiring the withdrawal of all foreign troops.

Regardless of the truth of opposition claims that it had a hand in February’s assassination on the Beirut seafront of five-time Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, there had been a “terrible confusion” about Syria’s response to the massive bombing, Hoss said.

Syria should have reciprocated when Israel pulled out of Lebanon five years ago and then it would never have been tempted to interfere so “unacceptably” in Lebanese affairs, he said.

Here's my next prediction: immediately preceeding my two previous predictions, Bashar Asad will be unmasked as the agent of Zionist perfidy that he is! I mean, how else to explain an Arab nationalist leader of the Arab street being brought low by hot Lebanese protest babes? He must be a Jooooooooooooooooo!

I mean, there's no other explanation, right?

Look for it on DU within the next 24hrs.

UPDATE: Well, THAT was quick: Syria moves towards multi-party election.

Maybe Bashar's opthamology practice can be on the first floor, and Daniel Ortega's private dectective office could be on the second. And you can get that crazy jackass defrocked priest who was "presidente" of Haiti for about 5 minutes during the Clinton adminstration running a travel agency on the third floor.