For those who have been invested for years in the long struggle to drive Syria out of Lebanon, the turn events have taken there since the Lebanese people have taken to the streets is extraordinarily encouraging. The left, the press, and even some skeptical Bush administration bureaucrats mocked the idea that the liberation of Iraq would inspire democratic revolutions elsewhere in the Middle East. The Los Angeles Times, under the headline “Democracy Domino Theory ‘Not Credible,’ ” reported on a classified State Department report that was supposedly titled “Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes.” The Houston Chronicle ran a dispatch from Cairo under the headline, “Arabs skeptical of ‘democratic domino theory.’ ” Even the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, cautioned Congress, according to a report in the New York Times, against making events in Iraq the basis of “a big domino theory about what happens in the rest of the Arab world.”

We’d refer them all to the photo on our front page today of some of the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of citizens of Lebanon who rallied peacefully yesterday and forced the resignation of the Syrian-dominated government there. First the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, then the Purple Revolution of Iraqis raising their dyed fingers after voting, now the Cedar Revolution against Syrian domination in Lebanon. Freedom, as President Bush has said so often, is something that is hungered for by all human beings, no matter what their nationality or religion. Despite the view that seems to obtain on the left, even Arabs have a desire for freedom. And today, it is on the march, and at least some of the Lebanese have said publicly that they are inspired partly by events in Iraq.

Which domino will fall next? Is it Egypt, where an aging President Mubarak, after years of authoritarian rule, is suddenly raising the question of how a new leader will be chosen? Is it Syria, which, as our Eli Lake reports today, is being targeted for pressure by those such as Senator Brownback who feel that Damascus has backed the terrorists in Iraq? The senator is talking about major funding for civil society groups, a tactic that certainly worked wonders in Iraq, starting with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Is it Iran, where pressure is building for the important next step of a popular referendum on theocratic rule? Such a referendum would, almost by definition, spell the end of such rule. It is hard to predict which domino will fall. But in the face of recent events, skepticism in the domino theory must be tottering like just another, well, dictatorial regime.