As I made clear yesterday, I was not impressed with National Review's editorial on lowering expectations of Iraqi governance in the near term. I was further, let's say, distressed reading contributor Peter Robinson's comments at the Corner, particularly the following:

As my Hoover colleague Tom Sowell said over lunch a couple of weeks ago (I made notes afterwards rather than during lunch itself, but this is a close paraphrase): “Don’t they [the members of the Bush administration] realize how many centuries it took to establish democracy in Europe? And now we’re supposed to establish democracy in Iraq? On a timetable?”

A democracy in Iraq would be splendid, of course. But since in all history the Arab world has seen exactly one democracy, that of Lebanon, which lasted only from the 1940s to the 1970s, it would represent a high achievement if we could merely ensure that Iraq proved, on the whole, peaceable and prosperous, becoming, as Mark Steyn has put it, “the least badly–governed Arab country.”

To which I responded via e-mail: "I don't know what volume of e-mail you've received in negative reviews of the NR editorial but I'm one who found it to be poorly reasoned, diffident and as naturally full of holes as mesh. Really a shock from NR - or perhaps not. To be frank, I'd try to avoid the patrician eye-roll on establishing democracy, pardon the meme, 'where there is no tradition.' Japan's military cabal wasn't exactly pluralist, and the Meiji period was little more than oligarchical modernization. The island didn't know individual liberties from Ragtime, and yet MacArthur's most sweeping reforms were done before the seven-year occupation was half over. Different from Iraq, yes, but then different from Germany. And Italy.

"I never thought I'd say this about NR but its distancing itself from Iraq with piquant one-liners is rather disgraceful."

Peter responded, graciously, with this:

Well put, and thanks for writing. I'll post a reply on the Corner.

[N]either the NR editorial nor my own posting, below, represents an attempt to back away from the project of rebuilding Iraq. What they represent is an effort to sort out our priorities. A stable currency, property rights, a functioning economy, basic public order (note that in Japan, Germany, and Italy alike, once the fighting stopped, it stopped)—each of these is at least as important to the future of Iraq as any set of electoral arrangements. Undemocratic nations are capable of making enormous progress (Taiwan under the Kuomintang, Hong Kong under the British, or, for that matter, Kuwait during these past few years under its own royal family) while democracies that lack the necessary legal and economic undergirding can dissolve into chaos (the Weimar Republic). A working democracy in Iraq would certainly represent a stunning achievement. But we need to be realistic about what we can and cannot accomplish in the space of a few years—and to put first things first.

I've responded:

I very much appreciate the response - thank you. If you have the time, something much less, er, emotive:

If the Bush administration and its supporters think that simply signing a constitution and holding elections will flip Iraq like a coin to democracy, then we are terribly misguided and due for disappointment. But given the White House's firm delineation of political handover, security withdrawal and direct elections - taking care to stagger the implementation of each - I would argue that the president does not believe this. His idealism paints a picture of a better Iraq through unfettered democracy, not an instant simulacrum of America.

I've reread the NR editorial and it's less objectionable to me as much as the first and second time. Yet here's where the point of contention seems to be: the editorial, with its deadly triumvirate of unsophistication, trauma and l'homme providential, builds a strawman claim that because paramilitary and political violence have not ceased, Iraq's society is in part responsible and therefore unprepared to assume the same self-governance as Wilsonians hoped. You sharply noted that other efforts in democratization began when the American military shifted from its war footing - something that has not happened in Iraq. But who is causing instability? There are two distinct groups in Iraq, it seems. And the reason for this seems to be external to the question of the Iraqi public character. To badly lift a Fukuyama concept, there are those who have eagerly left history and those who are still stubbornly and fanatically ensconced in it. The first group, Iraqis who are ready for life and liberty and all the rest, dwarfs the second. As it should be. The second group, identified though numerous reports over the year and especially in the past ten days, seem not to overlap with the first - but are instead the men America meant to fight in March, 2003 and intend to fight to further the war on terror. With a few exceptions, this group was never a potential segment of the first group; their hearts and minds are not to be won but, sadly, saturated with high-speed particulates of heavy metals. What we seem to be looking at is a two-week-old infant with a case of the whooping cough. Nothing wrong with baby - and that must be stressed - she's simply undeveloped and weak, and happened to be in a room highly contaminated with Bordetella.

Bring it back to Iraq: the problem isn't Iraqi society so much as it is the persistence of Ba'athists and foreign fighters. That insurgent elements are very obviously aided by Iran and Syria, and manned by nationals from nearly every Near East country only underscores the alien and irreconciliable nature of those responsible for this Bloody April. Iraq is proving challenging in the first year because it's the first Near East country in this age to have its polity forcibly changed to the delicacy of democracy; and as a consequence, it's literally surrounded by parties and states with whom America is - in the ideological figuration of the Bush Doctrine - at war.

Now we're almost saying the same thing. Here's the difference: I believe that Iraqis are no different than any other population whose vulnerable first years are marred by subtle invasions, and that if the sources of unrest were truly dealt with militarily, Iraqis would prosper relatively quickly. I assume one of the reasons Cold War administrations never hotly pursued assertive democratization is that they assumed the Soviets would poison every well. So I don't think it's an indigenous problem, if one consigns the Ba'athists and the criminal followers of al-Sadr to beyond Iraqi polity. At the same time, I do insist that the NR editorial is lukewarm on Iraqi democratic prospects. They didn't say "progress must be delayed until obstructive forces have been neutralized." Noting "the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is fundamentally still a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny" is a direct indictment of Iraqis themselves. The editors can't be talking about anything else.

My answer is to lower expectatons - not of the Iraqi people, but of the intentions of hostile interests to stand by and watch the natural assimilation of Iraqis into civil society. This seems to be a military problem, not a Wilsonian failure; thus the solution substantive, even plenary action against the elephants in the Near East room. True enough, the Iraqis owe us nothing, unlike the Axis, and we are therefore limited in our range of options within Iraq. But if anything, the current difficulties are a sign that Iraq was never meant to be separated from the war on terror.

A CLARIFICATION: Under no circumstances am I suggesting that Iraqi society is either traditionally democratic or without a multitude of scars and poor habits. It has many blemishes, lessons to unlearn. But all societies who have been forcibly or externally democratized bear these marks. My point is that Iraqis, separated from their organized tormentors, are really no worse off than any other erstwhile nondemocratic society.