If only Dubyah had realized this three years ago...

Rich Lowry is right: before you can have freedom and democracy and all that good stuff, you need order.

This is a fact which runs counter to the national mythos and our own instincts, but ours is one of the very few democracies ever to come out of a revolution against tyranny. Almost always, such revolutions end up substituting a new form of oppression for the old one (see France and Russia as examples). Democracy tends by its very nature to be reformist; it builds upon the character and ideals of a nation rather than inventing them (see England). You take the institutions and structures of a society and re-invent them in such a way as to uphold and support and even to assume democratic ideals; you don't destroy them and start over from scratch, whether you're domestic reformers or a benign foreign conqueror. The latter path- as we are seeing now in Iraq- nearly always leads to either chaos or tyranny.

Japan after World War II should have been our model (Germany is more complicated, having had an underlying liberal tradition to build upon). We should have preserved as many of the symbols and institutions of Iraqi national life as we could. De-Ba'athification should have been a matter of re-education, not blacklisting. Iraq's army and police should have been reformed, not disbanded. We should have changed as little about Iraq's political and military infrastructure as we could, consistent with its new character as a democracy. No, not even that; rather, in its new character as a relatively humane nation not hostile to the security and interests of the United States. The struggle for democracy, if choose it, is a struggle the Iraqi people- like every people- finally have to wage themselves. Democracy cannot finally be imposed from without.

If President Bush had realized that three years ago, we might be facing a different situation in Iraq. His speech the other night indicates that he's finally recognized this basic fact; let's hope that it's not too late for Iraq.