Precision of language is wasted on a lot of people here.

If Iraq negotiates the many pitfalls over the next ten to twenty years and winds up a democratic, individualist society, the Left will respond with "so what?" while marching to support those who will probably still be setting off intermittent bombs in Baghdad like the attacks on Israel. And Bush's role in the victory will be as thoroughly wiped from our culture as Reagan's role in ending the Cold War. So it goes.

The ten or twenty years has nothing to do with Bush or anyone else. It is my own best guess as to how long, minimum, it would take for Iraq to settle into a stable society that supports individual rights, assuming they can negotiate the various coup attempts, outside agitators, internal power struggles, and other things that plague many new nations. And even after democracy, with luck, is attained, the terrorists aren't going to let it go unmolested.

What exact role our military and other nations will have throughout this process remains to be seen, and anyone, Republican or Democrat who says they can predict this precisely, is mistaken. Ideally, most of this time will be largely Iraq doing its own heavy lifting.

At what point could it have been said that the United States arrived at the goal of being a truly free nation? After the Revolution? After the Constitution was written? After a bloody Civil War that killed 500 times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq so far? After women and blacks finally got the vote? Heck, we are still a work in progress, although we are a darn sight further along than many other nations in the world. And in some ways, we're starting to move the other way.