Some years ago, I owned a beagle named Leon. A handsome, lemon-colored dog, Leon had a terrific nose. Turn him and his brother Otis loose in a thicket, and if those boys didn't chase a rabbit out, then no rabbits lived there.

Alas, Leon also did a lot of "cold-trailing," baying down scent lines so old that the rabbits that left them probably existed only in the form of coyote scat. Other dogs knew when Leon was bluffing, but he could drive you nuts babbling about nothing. My hunting buddies nicknamed him "The Journalist."

I've started calling my current pack "The Pundits." See, they've developed this habit of accompanying distant police sirens with group howl-ins. Except when they get tuned up around 5 a.m., it's pretty funny to watch. Rather like the savants on "Meet the Press" or "Reliable Sources," they stand in a circle hooting and eyeballing each other with their noses pointed at the sky. Even my wife's basset hound joins the chorus. The only remedy is spraying them with the garden hose.

I wish Washington hounds were so easily discouraged. Recently, the D.C. pundits started baying about George W. Bush's brilliant success bringing "democracy" to the Middle East.

"Lately even the harshest critics of President Bush have been forced to admit: Maybe he's right about freedom's march around the globe," anchorman Brian Williams announced on NBC Nightly News. "What if we are watching an example of presidential leadership that will be taught in America's schools for generations to come? It's an idea gaining more currency."

Next came Andrea (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) Mitchell, who spoke of "a historic turning point, like the fall of the Berlin Wall." The analogy first appeared in David Ignatius' Washington Post column. It was attributed to Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader who'd had his U.S. visa revoked in 2003 after regretting that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whom he called a "microbe," had survived a Baghdad rocket attack. Vice President Dick Cheney echoed him on right-wing radio. It's an officially approved White House theme.

How sincere was Jumblatt? Let me put it this way: I have Lebanese-born relatives by marriage. (They're Christians, if it matters, which in Lebanon it sure does.) Their default mode for analyzing Middle Eastern politics is to assume that nothing is what it seems and nobody's motives are what they say. What really matters is which tribes/clans/religious sects/families are making alliances with which others for the purpose of screwing mutual enemies. They view other ways of looking at the world as childish.

Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 at U.S. invitation to quell a nasty civil war among very roughly the same factions now demonstrating. The fighting nevertheless continued for another decade, all but destroying Beirut, one of the world's great cities. After Hezbollah (the Shiite militia partly sponsored by Syria and Iran) inflicted punishing losses on Israel, there was a subsequent Israeli invasion and withdrawal. With the Israelis gone, many Lebanese, notably Christians, Sunni and Druze, want the Syrians out, too. The Shia, about 40 percent of the population, want them to stay.

But what set off the current wave of demonstration and counter-demonstration wasn't the U.S.-sponsored election in Iraq. (The Lebanese have been having parliamentary elections since the 1940s.) It was the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, blamed without evidence on Syria, although some suspect Israel, it's anybody's guess.

The idea of a U.S. president denouncing foreign invaders no doubt strikes most Lebanese as faintly hilarious. Will Bush now leave Iraq? Demand that Israel quit putting fences around Arab land in the West Bank? Give the Golan Heights back to Syria? For now, though, praising Bush might help drive the Syrians out. Period.

Then there's Palestine. Let's pray that Mahmoud Abbas, the recently elected prime minister, can help moderates prevail. But remember that the election happened simply because Yasser Arafat died. Arafat was elected, too. Should Israel use this historic opening to tighten its grip on East Jerusalem and expand West Bank settlements, the current mood cannot last.

Egypt? Please. Egyptian military dictator Hosni Mubarak says he'll let government-approved candidates run against him. That's exactly how the ayatollahs run Iran. Until joining the recent pro-Bush howl-in, pundits like The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer justified supporting Middle Eastern dictators because "(d)emocracy is not a suicide pact."

Unlike Washington pundits, few in Beirut or Cairo failed to notice that the Iraqi elections were held under martial law enforced by a foreign invader, with anonymous candidates and 42 percent of the electorate boycotting. Nor that the winners were Shiite religious parties answerable to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Iranian-born cleric who basically forced Bush to hold the elections.

So far, the anti-U.S. insurrection shows no signs of abating. Iraqis have been unable to form a government. Maybe after they do, pundits can quit baying at White House sirens and begin to assess what the Bush doctrine actually means.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@cs.com.