I'm pleased journalist Steven Vincent's weblog is more compelling than his recent contribution to National Review, which is a five-part series on an American's puzzlingly slow discovery that an authoritarian nation will actually be undergirded by a brutal authoritarian culture. A read of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and William Chapman's Inventing Japan neatly describes the parochial, power-based hierarchies that existed in Germany and Japan and frustrated any meaningful liberalization from the modern Weimar Republic and Meiji Restoration, respectively. Each country was lucky enough, as it were, to fall to the Allies and face both swift and forceful American reform. But the point is that like all dysfunctional families, despotisms are fundamentally the same: unfit for the rule of law until the strongest columns of predation can be swept aside and new foundations laid.

If there is one way in which Iraq's general society is different from the Axis countries, it is the stretch of time for which a population suffers under a dictatorship after the promises of glory and equity have been exposed as a great lie. The Third Reich and the Rising Sun were cut down only by war, in their prime: Iraq had been sitting stagnant, rotting from the inside, since at least 1988. On one hand, Iraqis suffer from easy resignation or despair. For them, living in fear is the only life they know, whereas most Germans or Japanese could look back to the Weimar or the Meiji, which — while unstable and fleeting and not so far removed from the older, harsher days — was each preferable to the violent ruin brought by the Nazis and militarists. Not so for the Iraqis; that is easy enough to tell from bloggers Zeyad or Hammorabi on their darker days.

But as I have noted before, Iraqis' wholesale disassociation from Ba'athism for nearly two decades has left them demonstrably more prepared for real freedom than the Germans and Japanese. The people of the Berlin-Tokyo Axis may have suspected defeat but not reform as it came, and were surprised. Iraqis, cordoned off from the world as they were by Saddam's regime, had nothing to gain from the slow starvation of the sanction days and nothing to lose by abandoning it, and were waiting for reform. Since it is plain that all authoritarian societies are, in each one's own way, equally unsuited for pluralist, democratic living as when first encountered by reforming occupations — and that there is nothing anomalous about the insurgency if only the relative severity of it — Iraqis should be at no disadvantage to becoming confident democrats in a time comparable or smaller than their historical counterparts. I have said often, especially since this April, that the Iraqi character and the insurgents are not of the same cloth. What better evidence to that end than a poll taken in Baghdad, where Iraqi citizens responded to more pointed acts of murder from terrorists by rejecting parochialism, tribalism and collectivism in one blow?