Ed Kilgore: Credit Where It's Due, Not Where It's Demanded

Guest-Blogging on TPM, Ed Kilgore, with whom I often disagree, expresses his surprise that anyone would think we owe Bush a congratulations for recent events in Syria and Lebanon:

Now I am aware the State Department made the appropriate noises, as its predecessors would have done, after the Hariri assassination, about Syrian dominance of Lebanon, and I also know the Bush administration has been generally hostile towards the Syrian government, as has been U.S. policy for as long as I can remember. But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment.

This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

Let us congratulate the Lebanese, not those in Washington who would take credit for their accomplishments.

Yes. Yes. And Yes Again. Now, if our government hadn't delivered, say, Canadian citizens into the hands of the Syrians to be tortured, then maybe I'd consider giving them a little bit of credit for, at the very least, not actually encouraging human rights violations in Syria. But credit for causing a democratic revolution in Lebanon? I don't think so.