Don't count Tony out

As Israel starts to put real pressure on Hezbollah, making their puppet masters in Iran and Syria look weak and inept, Tony Blair steps forward with a challenge:

Blair said the international community should tell Syria and Iran that they should either play by the same rules as the rest of the world “or be confronted.”

“Their support of terrorism, their deliberate export of instability, their desire to see wrecked the democratic prospect in Iraq, is utterly unjustifiable, dangerous and wrong.

“If they keep raising the stakes, they will find they have miscalculated,” Blair said in a speech to the World Affairs Council, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles.

I wish I’d been there. I wonder how the moribund liberal fuddy-duddies over at the LA Times are going to cover it. [No, you don’t. You don’t ever read that paper anymore.-ed. I told you. I read the food section. I thought you were on a diet.] But seriously, this war in Lebanon gets more dramatic every day as its implications widen. It may be hastening the disintegration of Iran and Syria faster than anything any of us had anticipated. When things start to unravel, they can go very quickly. The Syrians have stood by impotently with major operations within miles of their border. Will they do something? They are damned if they don’t but even more damned if they do.