Freedom of worship, expression, property; separation of powers and the right to a fair trial. In rebuilding Iraq, we cannot rely on the simplicity of such notions - indeed, we understandably take them for granted - to embed them successfully in the new government. Iran has already begun infultrating the country, inserting agents into the fervent Iraqi Shiite population, with arms full of neatly painted banners and biting Islamist slogans. If the greatest threat to any nascent democracy in Cold War Europe was from the Communists, in the democratizing Near East we will find it to be the Islamofascist culture of death.

Inspiration and clarity on the part of the Bush administration will do quite suitably. And, finally, after some weeks of tiptoeing about with platitudes about leaving reinstitutionalization to the Iraqis - as if it could be done with neither political nor military protection - the White House has obliged:

The United States expects an eventual government of Iraq to be a democracy where the rights of minorities are guaranteed, not a theocracy run by clerics such as in neighboring Iran, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says. "There should be a country that is organized and arranged in a way that the various ethnic groups and religious groups are able to have a voice in their government in some form," Rumsfeld said Monday at a Pentagon news conference. "And we hope (for) a system that will be democratic and have free speech and free press and freedom of religion."

It's been said, so now we can and should expect, though not without nominal piddling from the State Department, a democratic republican Iraq with as much strength, resilience, and perspicacity towards longevity as our own Constitution - which is, we should never forget, the longest-lived in all of history.