While this week’s trip by President George W. Bush to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt was never conceived as a triumphant victory lap around the region, the swift rout of U.S.-backed forces by Lebanon’s Hezbollah Friday has provided yet another vivid illustration of the rapid decline in Washington’s influence in the Middle East during his tenure.The events in Lebanon will no doubt cast a long shadow over Bush’s tour.

After all, it was only three years ago that he hailed the “Cedar Revolution” there as vindication of the kind of democratic transformation of the region that he insisted the invasion of Iraq was designed to launch.

Three years and a brief war between Israel and Hezbollah later, the Iranian- and Syrian-backed group appears more powerful and entrenched than ever…

–Jim Lobe, IPS, May 12, 2008

And now, of course, the most romantic flowering of the spirit America went into the region to foster: the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, in which unarmed civilians, Christian and Muslim alike, brought down the puppet government installed by Syria. …

To what do we attribute this Arab spring? … Our intellectuals and Middle East “experts” have been telling us that Bush’s grand project to democratize the region is a fantasy of a historical illiterate. … They warned us darkly that the alternative to the status quo was the seething Arab street—an unruly mob, anarchic, anti-American, pan-Arabist or perhaps Islamist, ignorant of all liberal traditions and ready to rise up against America should it disturb the perfect order of things by “imposing democracy.”

Turns out, the critics, liberal and “realist” got the Arab street wrong. In Iraq and Lebanon, the Arab street finally got to speak, and mirabile dictu, it speaks of freedom and dignity. It does not bay for American blood. On the contrary, its leaders now openly point to the American example and American intervention as having provided the opening for this first tentative venture into freedom.

–Charles Krauthammer, Time, March 7, 2005