Why were the Lebanese elections regarded as a “crushing defeat” for Hizbullah and FPM and their allies? It was not because the final count of seats was substantially different from what it had been before, but because pre-election hype had made it seem as if the opposition was going to sweep into power. When the government retained its majority amid high turnout, this was declared to be a wonderful thing and proof of the vibrancy of Lebanese democracy, such as it is, even though in terms of the sheer number of votes cast the opposition garnered more support. Because of the sectarian balancing act that is required in Lebanese government, the larger vote tally won by the opposition translated into a minority of seats because of where those votes were cast. In the parallel universe in which most Western commentary on such things is written, this was a repudiation of the opposition and a triumph for freedom, etc., rather than being seen as something of a fluke of Lebanese parliamentary politics. I suppose flukes don’t lend themselves very well to propagandistic uses. It is apparently far better to celebrate a biased, inherently rigged system as pure democracy in action. Unless the biased, inherently rigged system is Iranian, in which case it is nothing but an enormous sham.

Now let us turn to Iran. The pre-election hype was that the opposition candidate was enjoying a surge in support in the final weeks and stood a chance of forcing a run-off, if not actually beating the incumbent outright. Then, amid record-high turnout, the incumbent won handily and the opposition complained that it had been robbed. In other words, the hype in Lebanon was just hype and was shown to be such on election day, whereas it was God’s own truth in Iran. As the Leveretts argue in Politico today, Ahmadinejad’s official percentage of the vote is very close to his 2005 total against Rafsanjani. As it happens, this is true. Of course, this result was from the head-to-head run-off between two candidates, rather than the multi-candidate first round, but it is not necessarily impossible that a comparable percetange of a larger electorate backed Ahmadinejad in the first round as turnout increased. This does not rule out the use of fraud. Fraud may have been widespread as well, but what we do not know as yet is how significant the effect of this fraud was.

Given all of this, the readiness with which almost everyone in the West seems to be accepting the “coup” explanation is rather worrisome. It is similar to the lockstep consensus on the “Iraqi threat” six years ago that made war all but inevitable, and it is similar to our political class’ certainty last year that Georgia was merely an innocent victim of “Russian aggression,” which has been found again and again to be false. The “coup” in Iran is becoming one of those things that “everyone knows,” and as we have seen more than a few times in the past the things that “everyone knows” are not always true. Moreover, this thing that “everyone knows” about the Iranian election is based on partial, sketchy and biased information–sound familiar? There may be elements of the “coup” story that hold up under scrutiny. It is true that the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia are loyal to Ahmadinejad and had a significant role in all of this, but how much of that role was illegal under Iranian law remains to be seen.

Part of the “coup” argument is that America must not side against the Iranian people, and it is taken for granted that the people are on Mousavi’s side, because Mousavi’s claims of representing the majority are taken at face value and Mousavi’s side is sometimes simply identified as the side of The People. Were the situation reversed and Ahmadinejad supporters were the ones rioting, it is all but certain that no one would believe a word of their complaints. It is being called fascism when the police attack pro-Mousavi protesters, but you know that it would also be called fascism if it were Ahmadinejad’s people rioting in the streets rather than Mousavi’s, even if the positions of the two candidates were reversed exactly and their actions were identical. (Of course, if Mousavi were the incumbent, he might very well win, because no incumbent has ever lost in any Iranian presidential election–why exactly do we think that anything has changed this time?) If Ahmadinejad’s supporters were the ones in the streets, we would hear all about how they need to accept defeat and acknowledge the validity of the election, and if they refused to do so they would be charged with subverting the democratic process.

The “coup” argument is a consensus view that fits a lot of existing prejudices, allows us to reaffirm pleasant myths about the virtues of popular government (which we are supposed to believe would have yielded a good result, were it not for those meddling fraudsters), and provides an excuse for moralistic posturing in which we get to flaunt our enthusiasm for democracy mostly for our own satisfaction. I am increasingly skeptical that it describes the events of the last few days.

Andrew has an unusually bad suggestion for the President:

Oh, and the president should wear a green tie from now on. Every day. He need say nothing more.

A thousand times, no! Leave aside the political damage he would do to himself here at home by brandishing a tie with the color of political Islam, which is enough of a problem for Obama given the persistent, albeit fringe attacks on him on account of his ancestry, and just consider how inappropriate this is as a matter of relations with other states. I hope we would never suggest that the President deliberately wear the color blue or red before or after a British general election, and I hope no one would actually want the President to wear orange in solidarity with Yushchenko (though it could just as easily be misread as solidarity with the FPM) or yellow to side with the anti-Thaksin forces in Thailand. The President of the United States is not and must not be seen as a partisan in the elections of other nations. No matter the party and no matter the country, their cause is not and cannot be the same as his. For another thing, such a symbolic display of solidarity in the absence of action would be interpreted, correctly, as worse than doing and saying nothing. Nothing would please his domestic enemies more than to be able to mock his empty symbolism and falsely impute Islamist sympathies to him, and nothing would suit Mousavi’s enemies more than to be able to tie Mousavi to the United States through that symbolic identification. While we’re at it, it would be seen as an attempt to use worldwide sympathy for the movement in question to bolster himself politically while doing absolutely nothing for the people with whom he supposedly sympathizes. It would give the regime the pretext of treating Mousavi as an American lackey. They may do this in any case, but Washington need not enable or provide justification for this. The administration’s wait-and-see approach is the right one

As John has already said, U.S. involvement in the Iranian election controversy in any form is unwise. Except for the most generic statements condemning violence and urging peaceful resolution to the crisis, Washington should say nothing, and I mean nothing. After all, whose interests do we serve by having our government speak up? The casual assumption is that condemning foreign election fraud, of which there was probably a great deal in Iran, is both some kind of moral imperative and a strategically wise thing to do in order to aid Mousavi, which in turn is based on another questionable belief that Westerners are somehow obliged to aid him and his supporters. The first part of this is very dubious, and the second is clearly wrong.

Western policing of other nations’ elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country’s people. In Lebanon, the right people won, so the structural biases built into the Lebanese system are not only tolerated in the West, while similarly crude biases in the Iranian system are decried as outrageous, but the fruits of the Lebanese system are celebrated as a great triumph for freedom and light. The absurdity of avidly cheering Mousavi’s supporters, who voted for a man likely instrumental in the creation of Hizbullah, a few days after avidly cheering the so-called “crushing defeat” of Hizbullah in Lebanese elections earlier in the week should be apparent to everyone, but it is not clear to many people at all. Bhadrakumar’s commentary is invaluable in cutting through a lot of unthinking pro-Mousavi chatter:

Mousavi’s electoral platform has been a curious mix of contradictory political lines and vested interests but united in one maniacal mission, namely, to seize the presidential levers of power in Iran. It brought together so-called reformists who support former president Mohammad Khatami and ultra-conservatives of the regime. Rafsanjani is the only politician in Iran who could have brought together such dissimilar factions. He assiduously worked hand-in-glove with Khatami towards this end.

If we are to leave out the largely inconsequential “Gucci crowd” of north Tehran, who no doubt imparted a lot of color, verve and mirth to Mousavi’s campaign, the hardcore of his political platform comprised powerful vested interests who were making a last-ditch attempt to grab power from the Khamenei-led regime [bold mine-DL]. On the one hand, these interest groups were severely opposed to the economic policies under Ahmadinejad, which threatened their control of key sectors such as foreign trade, private education and agriculture [bold mine-DL].

For those who do not know Iran better, suffice to say that the Rafsanjani family clan owns vast financial empires in Iran, including foreign trade, vast landholdings and the largest network of private universities in Iran. Known as Azad there are 300 branches spread over the country, they are not only money-spinners but could also press into Mousavi’s election campaign an active cadre of student activists numbering some 3 million.

The Azad campuses and auditoria provided the rallying point for Mousavi’s campaign in the provinces. The attempt was to see that the campaign reached the rural poor in their multitudes who formed the bulk of voters and constituted Ahmadinejad’s political base. Rafsanjani’s political style is to build up extensive networking in virtually all the top echelons of the power structure, especially bodies such as the Guardian Council, Expediency Council, the Qom clergy, Majlis, judiciary, bureaucracy, Tehran bazaar and even elements within the circles close to Khamenei. He called into play these pockets of influence.

Were we to see a similarly bizarre alignment of the old guard and reformers in another context, quite a few Westerners might denounce the reformers’ alliance with the corrupt and well-connected. Oddly enough, the theme of corruption, which figured so prominently in Ahmadinejad’s attacks on Rafsanjani and Mousavi, has vanished entirely from any discussion of the political realities in Iran. There is undoubtedly a great desire to make the Mousavi forces seem more virtuous, and there is probably reluctance to endorse a criticism that Ahmadinejad has made, but just because someone’s enemies use the charge of corruption opportunistically and hypocritically doesn’t mean that the charge is baseless, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the charge doesn’t have a political impact. How would the election controversy look if we viewed it as a contest between Iran’s Huey Long and the representatives of an entrenched economic elite? Would Western sympathies shift at all? Would Westerners be less inclined to champion the cause of Mousavi as a result? Either way, we should all reflect on how easily we are biased in favor of one side or another in a foreign election based on partial, tendentious or misleading characterizations of the vying factions.

We pick sides like this all the time, and when we do it is almost always arbitrary, ill-informed and mistaken. For various reasons, one side in a contest is deemed to be more “pro-Western,” which occasionally even has the virtue of being true, and this side’s victory is then lauded as a great step forward, and anything preventing that victory is deemed inherently suspicious and illegitimate. In many cases, there really is fraud being perpetrated by the other, “anti-Western” side, and I don’t doubt that this is true to some extent in Iran, but the truly incomprehensible thing for so many Westerners is the possibility that the authoritarian populist whom Washington loathes actually commands majority support in his own country and could probably win without fraud. Why would such a person commit fraud and use violence to increase the scale of a victory that was already in his hands? Ask Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin. They know the answer, and the answer is fairly straightforward. The reason for doing this is to acquire and consolidate power. One way to do this is to provoke the opposition, bait them into resistance and then pose as the defender of social and political order. The Kremlin has been doing this to Russian liberals for the better part of a decade. If these were people deeply concerned about legitimacy as we think of it, they would have respect for the law. There is, however, no contradiction between seeking democratic mandate and engaging in lawlessness. The two are more allied than we like to believe. Indeed, what are we seeing from the protesters except an expression of the conviction that they are the rightful majority, which entitles them to disregard the formal law so long as they are fighting for the recognition of their votes?

According to the conventionally circulated myth of the last two decades and more, democracy is supposed to yield more reasonable, acceptable governments whose members are more like us and who are not as hostile to us. If this does not happen, it can only be explained by fraud or taken as proof that such-and-such a state is not a “real democracy.” On the contrary, again and again from Russia to Venezuela we see that these states are democracies, but they do not possess meaningful liberal, constitutional orders. Majoritarian democracy by itself looks rather unpleasant and unattractive, and this will simply not do for an entire establishment that has raised the word and the increasingly amorphous meaning of that word into idols. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t also fraud, but that there is an important difference between lawbreaking, illiberal democrats who abuse the levers of power to benefit their faction and those who want to destroy representative democratic elements in their political system.

Andrew has called for Obama to demand an inquiry into the election. If Khamenei has already done this, for whatever reason, Obama’s call to do the same would be redundant and possibly even harmful. I suppose it would be potentially harmful only if we assume that a goal of U.S. policy should be to ensure that Iran has had a fair election, but if that is not one of Washington’s goals its public statements on the election outcome would then simply be irrelevant. One of the great problems with a foreign policy that takes global “leadership” as a given is that it seems to compel the U.S. government to have an official view on every event and crisis around the world. The idea that there are events that have nothing to do with us, and which we have no business concerning ourselves with, is so alien to our policymakers that I am fairly sure that it never occurs to them. Certainly, if it ever did, they would dismiss it immediately as unacceptable “inaction” in a “time of crisis.” Discretion sometimes truly is the better part of valor.

We have just seen which country is truly the West’s beacon in the Levant. The land where one of the official languages is a European tongue and where elections are decided by the Christians (such as the President has to be), who have ensured the defeat of anti-Christian fanatics. ~David Lindsay

This is one of a couple of posts Mr. Lindsay has written recently that I am having some trouble understanding. For example, what can it mean to say that “the Christians” ensured the defeat of anti-Christian fanatics when most Lebanese Christian voters still supported the Hizbullah-allied FPM led by a Maronite? What can it mean to apply the name “anti-Christian fanatics” only to Hizbullah, which is allied with the largest party of Christians, when the March 14 coalition includes the largest Druze party? The Druze community derives from those medieval Muslims who glorified the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim as God on earth, who just happened to be one of the most zealous anti-Christian Muslim rulers in history and who demolished the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The governing coalition also enjoys the patronage of the Saudis, who are not all together Christian-friendly. Of course, this goes to illustrate how clear lines are hard to draw in Lebanese politics, as there are Christians and “anti-Christian fanatics,” if you will, on both sides of the spectrum and in both political coalitions, and it should remind us that we need to be wary of developing rooting interests for any faction in the internal conflicts of another country. If it is not in Israel’s interest to be regarded as the vanguard of the Enlightenment in the region, neither is it good for Lebanon or for our understanding of Lebanon to see the transitory vicissitudes of its electoral politics as having any grander civilizational significance.

Scott Richert and Richard Spencerhave been debating the murder of George Tiller. It will hardly come as a surprise that I entirely agree with Scott on this question, which will make some of what I have to say a bit redundant, but Richard has erred in his most recent post on something quite important that needs to be addressed more directly. Answering Scott’s remarks on regicide, Richard writes:

Were he [Tiller], however, performing abortions while holding the title of Baron of Wichita, then his murder would be just. Ditto if he were a soldier in an invading army performing abortions. Though I’m not sure where this leaves the status of Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama, two sovereigns who in their respective territories use the power of the state to engage in something Richert considers murder. Furthermore, would Richert like to argue that Bonhoeffer and Stauffenberg were justified because they attacked Hitler while he was head of state, but then would have sinned greatly if they, say, shot down a man who was operating a concentration camp?

There is a lot that Richard gets wrong here. Despite his complaints that Scott has misread his earlier remarks about just war, which would be easier not to misread if Richard stopped talking about pacifism, Richard keeps conflating conditions of war and peace, the status of combatants and non-combatants, the difference between members of the military and civilians, and those in power and those subject to it. Tiller was not a cog in some machinery of coercion and mass murder; he was not a soldier or agent of a government engaged in mass murder.

Were Tiller someone in authority and he was using the apparatus of the government in the commission of murders, his authority would be de-legitimized and would no longer be deserving of respect or obedience, and for the common good and the restoration of peace violence might justifiably be used against him. As an act of self-defense for the polity against illegitimate and abusive government, it might then be permissible to kill, so long as there were no peaceful remedy that could be used hold such a person accountable. Like war, this would have to be a last resort, especially considering the potential consequences for civil strife and disorder that could follow. What is important to remember about this is that such an action would be exceptional and would have to be in response to extreme circumstances. The obligation to submit to civil authority, even a negligent one, is not one that can or should be lightly tossed aside.

Likewise, the command not to murder is absolute, and for killing to be anything other than murder it has to be done under very specific circumstances by lawful authority. Killing is rarely justified, and we should be striving to raise barriers to make it harder to do this or to rationalize it rather than seek out loopholes that permit us to find more and more excuses for it. What has to remain foremost in our minds is that respecting the sanctity of life means that we as private citizens cannot presume to decide who deserves to live or die. This is the role appointed to those in authority, who legitimately wield power in order to restrain and punish the wicked, and even then only under certain circumstances. Their failure to restrain and punish does not give us license to take over for them and to shed blood, because we are not permitted to shed blood except in defense of ourselves, our family and our neighbors.

Lebanon’s voters have handed a clear defeat to the Hizbollah-led March 8 Alliance. In a smoothly run and peaceful election, the pro-Western March 14 Alliance emerged with a clear majority of 71 seats, compared to 57 seats for its rivals. The results elicited a nearly audible sigh of relief from Arab capitals, as well as from leaders in Europe and North America. ~Paul Salem

No doubt Mr. Salem is correct that our allied governments in majority Sunni countries and governments in the West were relieved by the election result, but consider how different the election outcome might seem to the publics of various Muslim countries around the world. They know that the Phalangists, for example, are members of the March 14 coalition, and they will remember that the Phalangists were allied with the Israelis during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and were directly involved in the massacres that forced Sharon from ministerial office at the time. They now see the Western world and the dictatorships of the Arab world rejoicing that these people and their allies remain in power. What will these people conclude from this? Nothing to our benefit, I’ll wager.

A great deal has been said about Obama’s changing of the tone, which has prompted calls for changes in substance as well, but what does the world see most Westerners celebrating? What does the world see many Westerners trying to credit Obama with? The preservation of the status quo in Lebanon. There has been no move to “the West” in Lebanon: the final numbers for government and opposition are virtually identical to 2005. In other words, there has been virtually no movement at all. To his credit, the President refrained from saying something stupid and congratulating the winners as some vanguard of freedom, but this has not stopped his cheerleaders and friends from doing this for him.

There are a lot of questionable claims being made about these elections. For starters, take the claim above that the opposition is “Hizbullah-led.” The March 8 Alliance itself is, yes, but not the opposition as a whole. Hizbullah is a major partner in the opposition, but if these numbers are at all correct they still have several fewer seats than the FPM. This is partly a function simply of the demographics of Lebanon, the sectarian representation built into Lebanese politics, and the requirements of the Doha agreement. In any case, FPM is the largest party in the opposition at the head of the Change and Reform group. Their presence in the government, had they won, would presumably have been greater. Then again, I suppose “Maronite-led” doesn’t sound quite so menacing. What everyone seems to keep omitting from their commentaries is that the Druze leader Jumblatt has said that Hizbullah will probably be invited to join a national unity government. What does that do to simplistic binary analyses of what’s happening in Lebanon? It destroys them.

Like Moran, McDonnell is counting on his roots in Northern Virginia to help him. But, like McAuliffe, he’s directing his ad spending toward pricey D.C. markets. This means that by the fall, he’ll be better positioned in voters’ minds than either Democrat was. ~Amy Walter

Put another way, McDonnell is not necessarily very strong outside of northern Virginia, and he will end up wasting his money in a media market where he will likely be trailing for the entire election. A McDonnell-Deeds race is not what the Virginia GOP could have been hoping for. All those rural areas of the state filled with registered Democrats who have grown weary of the GOP are much more vulnerable to Deeds. Republicans should reflect on what happened in MS-01 when they ran the suburbanite against the better-known small-town Democrat. Virginia Democrats who run in statewide races have relied on the D.C. suburbs in the north to put them over the top; Webb just squeaked by thanks to their support. Deeds hails from the southwest, which should give him a better chance of making inroads in the Valley and the Southside than Webb managed to do. At first glance, it seems as if all the advantages–name recognition, money, support in the north–belong to McDonnell, but Deeds is starting out modestly leading the AG (and that according to Rasmussen) and he has something of the same profile as the outgoing Tim Kaine. During the Warner and Kaine years, Virginia has been moving more reliably into the Democratic orbit, and it is not clear what McDonnell can do to change this. In the end, governors’ races can turn on local issues and the individual candidates, so McDonnell may not necessarily be burdened by his party affiliation,

Matt Steinglass attacks other foolish misreadings of election results. In this case, he is discussing the recent European elections as seen from Finland:

What happened in the elections was two things. First, support shifted away from the social democrats, and towards the Christian democrats. And second, a small right-wing party that’s descended from the 1950s-era agrarian/farmers party, whose main platform is anti-immigrant and anti-Europe, picked up a lot of votes, and in fact that party’s charismatic leader was the single largest vote-getter in the elections, pulling about 130,000 votes (which is huge in 5-million-strong Finland). But that party still isn’t actually in the government, and it has no positive governing agenda. And even if it did, that governing agenda would almost certainly have nothing to do with free-market economics.

This is an important point. With the exception of perhaps Vlaams Belang in Belgium, most anti-immigration, anti-Europe and “far-right” parties in Europe are not economically liberal, and the economically liberal parties are not anti-immigration or anti-Europe. Across much of Europe, as in this Finnish example, artisanal populist, peasants’ or farmers’ parties have tended to be equally skeptical of market liberals and the transnational European political project. Our populists, such as they are, tend to be wedded to our peculiarly continental nationalism, which in the European context would make them pro-Europe “federalists,” which is why it may be less surprising, if not less irrational, for most of our populists, especially on the right, to embrace market liberalism, while it is left to the fairly marginal decentralists, both right and left, to argue against political and economic consolidation.

There is some evidence that market liberals had some success in the European elections, but this is mostly because those parties also benefited from anti-incumbency sentiment. In Germany, for example, the Free Democrats almost doubled their share of the vote over the previous election, but this was, like so many other gains by smaller parties in the EP, a product of discontent with the CDU-SPD coalition government. Unlike the Finnish example, German voters interested in protesting against the government could not vote for either major party and many of them settled for one of the main opposition groups. It seems that most of the support that the Union lost went straight to the Free Democrats, but this does not exactly herald a massive rejection of Christian Democratic ideas about social solidarity.

As long-time readers know, I have been willing to give Obama credit for his diplomatic moves and his interest in emphasizing conciliatory measures designed to thaw relations with a number of other states that the previous administration had treated mostly as adversaries and threats. I have had positive things to say about his approach towards Russia, his appearance at the Summit of the Americas and, with significant qualifications, even his speech in Cairo, but I cannot think of anything more misleading than to claim that the Lebanese election outcome was meaningfully influenced by the speech in Cairo.

Cynthia Tucker has claimed that the speech had some significant influence:

The president did, it seems, change some minds in the Middle East.

On Sunday, an American-aligned coalition won a surprising victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, pushing back a challenge by Hezbollah, which had been widely expected to win a majority of seats. There were undoubtedly many factors at play — Lebanon’s politics are fractured and Byzantine — but Obama’s well-received speech has been credited with making a difference.

Let us think through this for a minute. Suppose for a moment that it is true that the speech “made a difference” and changed some minds in the region–why do we assume that a March 14 victory is proof of the speech’s influence? What possible connection is there? March 14 is a coalition that was very openly aligned with the previous administration and remains very closely aligned with Saudi interests. It was already the governing coalition. At most, voters stayed with the devils they knew. There had been expectations that they would be defeated, but pre-election predictions can often be mistaken, especially when they do not take increased turnout into account. Perhaps if turnout had remained lower, the outcome would have swung the other way, and Ms. Tucker would now be doing her best to persuade us that Obama’s speech had no influence on the opposition’s victory.

March 14 is a predominantly Druze and Sunni coalition supplemented for the most part by smaller Maronite and other Christian parties. Most everyone seems to agree that it was Aoun’s bungling during the campaign that alienated key Christian votes, who ran into the arms of the governing coalition. To the extent that one can imagine that the speech had any impact on the voting behavior of pivotal Christian voters, I suppose one might identify the reason for this influence on the passing remark Obama made about treatment of Maronites, which might have dovetailed with existing fears about Hizbullah, but it seems awfully strange that this remark would have worked to drive Christian voters away from the largest Christian political organization in the country.

Why else would Christian voters who backed March 14 rather than the opposition coalition, which included Michel Aoun‘s Free Patriotic Movement, have come away from a speech that was entirely about Islam and “the Muslim world” with any changed opinions about anything? This is the most generous explanation I can conjure up, and it is a real stretch. Is it not far more reasonable to assume that these voters ignored or simply didn’t care about Obama’s speech and based their decision to switch support to March 14 on their own distaste for Aoun’s cavorting with the Syrians and Iranians? Most of the commentary on Obama’s alleged influence on the Lebanese outcome seems to be little more than examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy at work. Lebanon had almost no place in Obama’s speech, much to my dissatisfaction, and except for the reference to the Maronites one would have to look very hard to find any statement that would have been relevant to Lebanese voters.

More to the point, Obama’s supporters and everyone who wants to see a diplomatic track with Iran succeed are doing themselves no favors by playing up the influence of the speech in Lebanon, when Iran figured much more prominently in Obama’s speech and the Iranian election seems unlikely to yield a similarly welcome surprise. If Ahmadinejad loses, it will be in large part because his pie-in-the-sky domestic spending program scarcely materialized, unemployment has worsened and economic conditions remain bad for his core supporters among Iran’s poor. He ran as a sort of economic populist, and has not delivered much to his voters. At the same time, he has played the buffoon in international affairs, which can hardly have helped his image at home. If he still manages to prevail because of the divided opposition, he will be able to claim vindication, and all of the people pushing this far-fetched claim about Obama’s influence in Lebanon will be at pains to say why Obama’s speech could help defeat Hizbullah but failed to do in the Iranian demagogue. The end result will be to judge the effectiveness of Obama’s speech by internal political events in other countries over which he could not possibly have any control and over which he has relatively little influence. It is a guaranteed way to set Obama up for failure, and as has happened so often it is his friends and allies who are doing this to him.