You have to love this:

President Bush asserted yesterday that Hezbollah was defeated in its month-long conflict with Israel, casting the fighting that killed hundreds of Lebanese and Israeli civilians as part of a wider struggle "between freedom and terrorism."

More interesting in this article is this:

Bush warned Tehran to stop backing militias in Lebanon and in Iraq, where U.S. officials have long accused Iran of feeding the sectarian violence that is threatening to erupt into a full-scale civil war.

"In both these countries, Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold," Bush said. "The message of this administration is clear. America will stay on the offensive against al-Qaeda. Iran must stop its support for terror, and the leaders of these armed groups must make a choice. If they want to participate in the political life of their countries, they must disarm."

"Forces of terror see the changes that are taking place in their midst. They understand that the advance of liberty, the freedom to worship, the freedom to dissent, and the protection of human rights would be a defeat for their hateful ideology," Bush said. "But they also know that young democracies are fragile and that this may be their last and best opportunity to stop freedom's advance and steer newly free nation to the path of radical extremism."

And that whole advancing of liberty thing in Iraq, going well is it? Ah, not so much.

John Hendren, reporting for NPR on a killing in an East Baghdad grocery: "The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he 'suggestively arranged his vegetables.' ... [A]n Iraqi collegue explained, matter of factly, that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flier directing grocers how to display their food. Standing up a celery stalk near a couple tomatoes in a way that might, to tbe profoundly repressed, suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense."

Post bombing, of course.