I am not the one who said it. I did in fact find it in today's Washington Post, no lapdog for The Bush White House I assure you.
These are autocrats whose regimes had remained unaltered, and unchallenged, for decades. There has been no political ferment in Damascus since the 1960s, or in Cairo since the 1950s. Now, within weeks of Iraq's elections, Mubarak and Assad are tacking with panicked haste between bold acts of repression, which invite an international backlash, and big promises of reform -- which also may backfire, if they prove to be empty. They could yet survive; but quite clearly, the Arab autocrats don't regard the Bush dream of democratic dominoes as fanciful.
The Lebanese uprising is far more advanced than that of Egypt. But Mubarak has taken the boldest action, in part because he has almost as much to fear as Assad from the Beirut intifada. A forced Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon might spell the downfall of the Assad dynasty in Damascus. Either way, in the absence of Syrian coercion, the Lebanese parliamentary election in May would become the third free democratic vote in the Arab world this year. That would make it politically impossible for Mubarak to extend his own tenure by patently undemocratic means.
As Hannibal (of the A-Team) was fond of saying, "I love it when a plan comes togather."
UPDATE: Michael Barone of US News & World Report has an excellent essay on the same subject entiltled, "Minds Are Changing" and you don't need to subscribe to anything to read it.
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