Lebanon's "liberator"?.

Walid Jumblatt is head of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), a post he inherited from his father Kamal, who was awarded the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1972. Despite the fact that his father was assassinated in 1977 on orders from then--Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad, Jumblatt became an asset of Damascus, joining the pro-Syrian National Salvation Front in 1983.

Supplied with massive amounts of Soviet weaponry, Jumblatt's forces overran 60 Maronite Christian villages in late 1983, killing more than 1,000 people and leaving an estimated 50,000 homeless. He also displays what Toby Harnden of The Spectator of London calls "a penchant for virulent leftist anti-Americanism." In the past two years alone, Jumblatt has publicly celebrated the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia and the death of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. By any reasonable definition, the 55-year-old Jumblatt would appear to be a radical Arab terrorist in the mold of Yasir Arafat. However, because of a well-publicized "break" with Syria last year, Jumblatt has been designated a key figure in Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" against continued Syrian occupation--and now suddenly finds himself, in Harnden's words, "The Pentagon's new pin-up boy."

"Even a man like Walid Jumblatt who has said some not so nice things in the past has had a lot of courage in standing up to the Syrians; we admire that," commented Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the administration's most outspoken war hawks.

In fact, Jumblatt is precisely the kind of amoral opportunist the Bush administration could use as a surrogate to run "liberated" Lebanon. After all, the murder of Jumblatt's father and several close relatives by a Syrian didn't deter him from making an alliance with Damascus. Now that Washington has set its sights on Syria, the same Marxist terror chieftain who once denounced George W. Bush as a "mad emperor," Tony Blair as a "peacock," and Wolfowitz as a "virus," is on the market looking for a new patron.