A cautionary in the National Review from Cato senior fellow Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. on an irreplaceable ingredient to successfully transforming Iraq into a peaceful, free-market democracy includes a warning to the Bush administration:

Bush administration officials are reportedly unwilling even to discuss privatizing Iraq's oil. If the White House does not establish private-property rights in Iraq, especially for its principal resource, then the United States will have fought a war to maintain a Soviet economy in the Middle East. Before long, one dictator will be replaced with another. The lives lost and money spent will have been for naught.

Private-property rights provide a peaceful means for allocating resources where violence would otherwise reign. By establishing title to income streams, property rights enable people to trade money for more titles, or vice versa. The absence of private-property rights in natural resources drives civil wars. This is true whether the resources are oil or diamonds, and whether the locus is Angola and Nigeria, or Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Japan may appear to many as a grandfathering, centralized plutarchy but in legality and principle it harbors a free economy energized by private property. According to former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief William Chapman, Douglas MacArthur ensured that nearly three-quarters of Japanese who were tenant farmers under the Meiji and militarist periods became protected landowners He knew that without the acknowledged means to pursue independent enterprise, a country's population is only as capable as the vision of its government - which means that the market is literally at the mercy of its government.

Given that the continuing insurgency has sapped a good deal of momentum from the Provisional Authority while it has physically hampered efforts at reconstruction, we should allow the Bush administration reasonable leeway in determining the correct time to implement land and resource reform; after all, the absence of a central authority with executive, legislative and judicial powers to actually redeem rightful ownership would render any attempts fruitless. MacArthur had both the Diet and a Prime Minister with whom he could work; no matter how recalcitrant Yoshida Shigeru and other reactionaries might have been, the Japanese people had an elected government to grudgingly enact and enforce the Supreme Commander's own New Deal. Iraqis have no more than a temporary, rotating government that answers to an occupational authority; and bands of various armed parties hostile to freedom in any form.

Without a doubt, private property is vital. Let's wait for the right moment.