Late last month Freedom House released a report celebrating a brief modern history of democratic achievement through popular reason and intellect alone. In a publication entitled "How Freedom is Won: From Civic Struggle to Durable Democracy," the organization has quantified successful liberalization in sixty-seven countries over thirty years as validation of non-violent struggle, the kind of "people power" billions have witnessed from Asia to Africa to the Americas to the old Eastern Bloc; and more recently in the Revolutions Rose, Orange and Cedar by Georgians, Ukrainians and Lebanese.

Freedom House's keystone is its "civic coalition," an entity of free association and itself a right that must be recaptured from governmental expropriation. The report is a gushing endorsement of neither satyagraha nor ambivalence: Freedom House's two caveats hold that, first, authoritarians will offer less than what organized people must take from them; and second, that the rule of strength must be at least partially mitigated before any democratic gains can be made. Freedom House's preferences are spelled out in its recommendations to policymakers in free countries with phrases like "collapse of authoritarian rule," "aid," "pressure," "support," and "resistance." That freedom requires self-reliance does not mean struggling people ought to do everything for themselves.

Specific and timely exertion of force or diplomacy must be understood and their mutual uses defended. The war on terror, the concept of democratization, the sacrifices of military liberation and the patient diligence of diplomatic liberalization have been resisted by the left and the Democratic Party when not outright reviled. Caught between a yet-unconquerable enmity for George W. Bush and a moral compass that is both relativistic and obsolete, opponents of the war and otherwise popular war policies have tread a strange course that has often defied repute and, as domestic political stakes have risen only to be won by President Bush and the right, stumbled into sociopathy. Last July the Democratic Party's own presidential convention brought an elder senator forward to compare a sitting president to elemental fear; that was followed by an offer for Americans to trade one soldier's life for that of twenty thousand Iraqis; and then a public bitterness on the victory side of Iraqi National Assembly elections, as if the triumph of freedom in the midst of violence and uncertainty had been at the left's expense. All of this came across television, print and webstream to scores of nations — including Iraqis, who were free men and no longer some black-on-white statistic, and could finally listen and hear their dehumanization.

Charles Rangel, Congressman from New York, particularly derisive of Third World freedom on First World dime, has now placed Iraqi democracy alongside the Holocaust. Given the choice between distant parallels, Saddam Hussein's twenty-five years of extermination and a difficult first years against Hussein's would-be Islamist successors, Rangel reached over those two and picked American intervention. Any explanations will be worthless, save those delineating Mr. Rangel as a common racist or a more focused, anti-Arab bigot. He is not serious; if Americans were more confident in their convictions the man would be out of office by next Monday. But Rangel is not unique and should not be confused with those who sincerely believe in appealing to conscience, where a legitimate conversation must be had.

Ahmad at weblog Iraqi Expat speaks as one who knows exactly what once prevented the Iraqi people from forming their "civic coalition," namely the gangster state of Saddam Hussein:

I have seen the wars, though not the last one; I have lived in Iraq during the sanctions; I have been afraid all of my life of any government official and the lowest rank police officer who I have to thank and apologise to if he decides to slap me and spit on my face. I simply lost hope. I used to think that Saddam [could] be toppled by the people, by an assassination or a revolution; but I was dreaming. It would never have happened, and even if it would, a new dictator would have came a long just like 1958, 1963 and 1968. Otherwise, Qussay would have been next.

...Freedom and democracy doesn't come free and dreams take us nowhere. We may not succeed, but that is our problem; and as Kanan Makiya said, "The war made it possible for the country to have a chance — I am not saying a guarantee — of moving ahead in a democratic fashion".

Terrorism in Iraq is aberrant to the democratic process: it aspires to no coherent ideology and it is foreign where not comprised of former regime agents who fully embraced criminal activity when the pretense of civil authority was brought down by Allied soldiers. The Iraqi politic is moderate to progressive on matters of liberty. Yet the Iraqi civic coalition contends with an authority slow to accept its place among free men: the international right, harried by the left and its characters like Charlie Rangel, still trudges along with a lack of confidence in democratic values and their exportation.

Two countries whose tyrannical regimes are currently attacking Iraq and the Allies, Iran and Syria, have their own diasporas and dissidents living in frustration — ready to form their civic coalitions but prevented from doing so by a sufficient measure of violence and intimidation. To further liberalism and bring the end of this war and all others nearer, we have three obligations: rejecting the crass left; contributing to transitional movements; and considering Ahmad's dilemma, whether in certain circumstances the example set forth by Freedom House can only be followed when we begin with the force of arms.