MIDDLE EAST: Now It's Syria Superstar

With the self-assurance of an imperial proconsul, Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam last week presided over a cease-fire in Lebanon that Damascus had not merely proposed but had imposed. At Beirut's presidential palace, the amiable diplomat—many Lebanese have already begun calling him the "Kissinger of the Arab world"—received one delegation after another from Lebanon's rival political and confessional factions. Meanwhile, a team of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese officers monitored the cease-fire—the 23rd in the nine-month-old civil war—and managed to restore a measure of relative calm to the strife-torn country....