Is a system of power accumulation. The essense of democracy is free, fair, and open elections. The governments produced by this process might well be inefficient, irresponsible, corrupt, dominated by special interest groups, theocratic, etc. All of this does not make them undemocratic.

Without the needed element of liberalism, in the sense Tom refers to as "classic liberalism" there is no protection for the individual's automony and sheild from the force and violence that are monopolies of the state. It is the marriage of democracy and liberalism that reaches back to the philosophies of the Greeks and Romans that allows and encourages individual liberalism. This is the liberalism won from King Johm in 1215 when the barons forced the king to limit his own authority. Being a democracy is something relatively new, and is a phenom that has bloomed only since the end of WWII, with any semblance of universal adult sufferage. One hundred years earlier most Western nations had some form of constitutional liberalsim.

If we have only brought democracy to the Afghan we have only institutionalized mod rule. Not a very viable contribution. I was via democracy that Hamas has come to power. And the Taliban could very well come to power by that same route in the near future.

We need to be careful about what we wish for-----we might get it. And it is time for all of us to recognize we are liberals. The only question remaining is to define if we are classical liberals, or if we are welfare liberals, or a blend thereof.

Publius, a fellow liberal