The truth

Another excellent column by Claudia Rosett, posted up on OpinionJournal. The start (but don't miss the rest!):

A friend was wondering the other day what frontiers are left to explore, now that scientists have pretty much mapped the planet. The answer, I'd suggest, lies less in the stars than along the frontiers of human freedom--which over the past few decades have been edging out dictatorships from Asia to Latin America to Eastern Europe. Today, sped along by President's Bush's bold move two years ago to break the despotic gridlock of the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, that same push for freedom has arrived at the region's palace gates.

Though Saddam has been the only Middle Eastern tyrant so far to fall, there is no question that in the politics of that region a shift is under way. It seems that even in a part of the world the West has long written off as the turf of dictators, oil and not much more, people want freedom. The removal of Saddam is reverberating far beyond Iraq. In recent months the message has become ever clearer, from the astounding election turnout in Iraq, to the demonstrations for democracy in Lebanon, to dissidents raising their voices in Syria, to public demands for pluralism in Egypt--as well as the continuing democratic foment in Iran.

In all this, no where has the clamor for liberty and accountable government been more acute than in Lebanon, a nation that during the last century boasted democratic institutions before there were mutilated by war, then smothered by Syria's occupying forces. And in recent weeks, in their struggle for freedom, the Lebanese people have voiced a vital demand, one that deserves far more attention than even the considerable amount it has already received. They have been telling it in English to the world press, and writing it in Arabic in white-and-black signs across their country, on walls, billboards and banners.

They are demanding, simply: "The Truth."