The Lesson Of Lebanon?

Bret Stephens wonders in the Wall Street Journal if the Tahrir square will produce a George Washington figure, and asks the Egyptians to take caution from Lebanon:

[Lebanon’s Experience is] a useful lesson in the limits of the very kind of people power now being celebrated in Egypt. It’s not enough to be against, or to bring down, a hated regime. It’s not even enough to be for something, at least in the sense in which the Arab world now seeks a freer and more representative political dispensation. What’s required is the statesmanship that can give concrete form to a hazy political dream.

Some people, especially die-hard March 14 believers think it’s a mistake to say that the Cedar revolution (or the orange one in Ukraine for that matter) didn’t accomplish anything. And the idea that a charismatic, selfless leader should emerge to stir the outcome of successful revolutions might strike the Lebanese as ironic, since it was the very assassination of such a leader that provoked the revolution in the first place.