Autocrats never accept responsibility for the misery of their people

This is for all the filthy apologists of Ba'athist thinking, and those simpletons who think they can create peace in the Near East by killing and scaring off the minorities of the region (the Christians, Jews, Druze, progressives), and especially for anyone who has ever carried a sign saying “Bush/ Blair/ Howard are the real terrorists!”

Michel Aoun gives us the skinny and an object lesson. It's an oldie but a goodie, and it still applies to the present age where the Western Left thinks that terror will end when it's renamed and ignored:

Lebanon was the first victim of modern terrorism. Its recent history presents the West with a stark lesson about the consequences of falling prey to terrorists. At the end of the 1960s, Lebanon, a multicultural society, began to absorb the shocks of the conflict between East and West. In the early 1980s it found itself at the frontlines of a worldwide confrontation with Islamic fundamentalists.

It is undeniable that terrorists come from countries ruled by autocratic regimes with no respect for human rights or basic freedoms. Autocrats, whether theocrats or dictators, accept no responsibility for the misery of their people. Instead, they artfully shift responsibility to political opponents whose liquidation then becomes justified, or to external enemies to whom the peoples_ hostility is deflected. Thus, these regimes not only harbor terrorists, they use terrorism as a key instrument of their foreign policy, as blackmail. Terrorism is inseparable from these regimes, which are the factories of terrorism. The eradication of terrorism must by necessity include their ouster.

Only democratic regimes with free economies and respect for human rights and basic freedoms can provide individuals the opportunity for positive self-fulfillment, free from hatred and violence. Free economies cannot thrive under repressive political systems, nor under justice systems subservient to rulers instead of the rule of law. Democracy cannot survive in the same environment as schools that call for the annihilation of others. It is no longer sufficient to denounce the crime and arrest and punish the criminal. We must close the schools that are teaching the criminals.

Read it all here, and see how history has repeated itself. A proxy element of Syria initiates an attack in Israelis that they can’t let lie because it continues, and like the MacArthur’s paradox in the Korean War, knows that to attack the REAL aggressor (Syria in this case) is a risk “lucid” politicians worldwide (given to endless amelioration of the sort that keeps wars alive) cannot stomach.