The enemy of your enemy is sometimes your enemy

Their rally was bigger than our rally. I?m talking about Lebanon: Hezbollah?s pro-Syria rally this week was bigger than the opposition parties? anti-Syria rallies.

I use the terms ?their? and ?our? loosely, because, after all, where do ?we? come in? The United States is opposed to that Evil Axis-candidate Syria, and also opposed to the terror army Hezbollah. Fine. But when I read that Lebanon?s anti-Syria opposition parties -- our guys? -- are trying to ally themselves with Hezbollah in their struggle against Syria, I think maybe I?d like to watch things thaw some more before diving in.

?In recent remarks,? the Globe and Mail reported last week that Walid Jumblatt, a main leader of the Lebanese Druze, anti-Syrian opposition, ?has gone out of his way to praise Hezbollah?s head, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, as a ?great leader,? and has repeatedly called on him to join the opposition.?

That was last week. This week, with Hezbollah?s big showing for Syria in Martyrs? Square, it looks as if Jumblatt?s gambit didn?t work. Or didn?t work yet. Such maneuverings in Middle Eastern politics (where Nasrallah, incidentally, is the democratically elected leader of Hezbollah, which controls 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament) show how the enemy of your enemy can really turn out to be your enemy -- certainly not someone to wave large flags over.

But I can think of more clear-cut and effective uses of People Power. For instance: filling Europe?s much more picturesque city squares with flag-of-their-choice demonstrators calling for the European Union to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

Incredibly enough, the European Union does not consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization. But it was the terrorists of Hezbollah, a.k.a. Party of Allah, who killed 241 Marines and 24 U.S. Embassy personnel in Beirut in 1983; they also kidnapped and murdered U.S. Army Col. William Higgins and the CIA?s William Buckley. In 1994, the group killed 95 Agentinian Jews at a community center; in 1996, it was 19 U.S. servicemen at the Khobar Towers.