Steve, what you wrote expresses a widely-held faith that things will turn out OK in Iraq, somehow. I feel a need to pick it apart, but it's not because you wrote it, it's the general belief I want to analyze. I'm arguing with millions of people besides you.

The Iraqi people are starting to feel free

What makes you think so? The "civil war" just keeps getting bloodier and bloodier, and it's starting to appear that the President we just installed will turn out to be a "strongman" in a similar vein to Saddam--but our strongman, much as Saddam was in the '80s. I'm not sure what circumstance in Iraq right now would make anybody feel free. Can you really feel free if you're afraid to go to the market for fear of being blown up?

and will once again be the great county they were

Wouldn't you have to go back several thousand years to the days when Babylon was a flower of civilization? I don't see how occupation of the same patch of ground as a once-mighty civilization confers any special abilities on the present-day occupants of the area. Living on the site of the Roman Empire doesn't seem to have endowed the Italians with any special gifts in the modern world.

Once they become comfortable with freedom as a natural thought they will excel in intelligent detail.

If they get there. That's a case of using the desired outcome as an argument for the present means of getting there--entirely circular.

Freedom is very powerful.

That's a variation on the simplistic chestnut "they just hate freedom!", which ranks down there with "they're just jealous!" in its lack of meaning and insight. Who "hates" freedom? Even in totalitarian societies I'd say few people actually want to go to prison or be killed. That's like saying "they hate breathing" or "they eat their young" in its irrationality.

The nuanced reality behind those views is actually a continuation of the debate we've had since the dawn of Western civilization over the proper balance between freedom and security. Theocracies offer an almost blissful sense of security that transcends life on Earth into the hereafter, and that is seductively attractive to a significant number of humans. Not everybody has ambitions to open a new frontier or make billions in business; a great many people just want to get through life with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of security and predictability. The millions of people who think Islamic governments are a good idea aren't crazy; they have reasons that make perfect sense to them, if not to you and me.

The problem with the Bush Doctrine is that we have no intention of allowing those people to choose for themselves what balance to strike between freedom and security. There's a cognitive dissonance to the idea of imposing freedom on a people--what if they freely choose to say "no"?

Islamic dogma demands Islamic government, so in a sense we're demanding that Muslims choose between their religion and our political values. Do you really think we're going to win that one easily? Here in America devout Christians chafe under our very mild separation of church and state; how would they react if they were told (and by an outsider) that they have to choose between being American or being Christian?

It's good to have faith. Faith, they say, can move mountains. But it seems to me that the more a faith is grounded in reality, the more power it has. I'm afraid I see little power in the blind faith that things will turn out OK in Iraq (if we just reelect Bush). We're going to have to make things turn out right, guided by a realistic appraisal of the realities in Iraq and the Middle East. Pollyanna optimism isn't enough. That's part of what got us into this mess in the first place.