IN EUROPE, the United States, and the Middle East, it has become commonplace to hear doubts, if not derision, expressed about the wisdom of the Bush administration's abetting the creation of a democratic Iraq. Most of the folks who think Iraqi democracy a lame idea are of course also opposed to the war, and would no doubt be against it even if they thought Iraq's various people--Shia and Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, and Christians--could form a democratic union. If the Iraqi people had had a long, glorious parliamentary tradition before Saddam Hussein, liberal antiwar critics like Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (a tenacious supporter of Chinese dissidents) might be a little less quick to suggest that this war would be immoral. Critics such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski would of course have no such problem. Among the antiwar "realists," stability and the comity of leaders are the beginning and end of foreign affairs. The coming war in Iraq has already proven too unsettling to the world order they know and love.

But one can also detect even on the pro-war side an anxiety about America's assuming a serious democratic mission civilisatrice in the Middle East. There has been a distinct carefulness in the language of many senior Bush administration officials whenever the "d-word" comes up. The boldness of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--"If we commit . . . forces, we're not going to commit them for anything less than a free and democratic Iraq"--has not often been repeated. Do a Lexis-Nexis search for the words "democracy" and "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld," and you will see that Rumsfeld appears more comfortable juxtaposing "free" or "liberated" with Iraq.

Parsing the sentences of senior administration officials, of course, can be misleading and unfair. Until the presidential speech on February 26 at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner, President Bush had not clearly and forcefully put his mandate behind the democratic franchise in a post-Saddam Iraq. And even in that speech the president seemed careful not to overuse the word, preferring to describe an Iraqi society liberated from totalitarian crimes rather than one primed by America to enjoy the freedoms unique to democracies. Such distinctions are indeed quite similar to those made by many pro-American Iraqi exiles, who believe the United States' primary role is to liberate them from tyranny, not to instill in them democratic virtues or monitor for long those virtues' postwar application.

And any reservations senior U.S. officials may have about deeply committing America to the implantation of democracy in Iraq will likely be reinforced by the worker-bees at the State Department and the Pentagon, who will be directly responsible for policy on the ground. Foggy Bottom, which has never been wild about the war, does not appear to be bubbling with enthusiasm about the possibilities for the Arab world's first democracy. Our traditional "allies" in the Arab world--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan--aren't fans of this war, and State naturally absorbs the reservations of the officials with whom it deals. American diplomacy always inclines toward preserving the status quo, and the Bush administration since 9/11 has adopted an approach to the Middle East--the Axis of Evil doctrine, the War on Terrorism, and the advocacy of greater individual liberty and democracy--that is enormously unsettling to the dictators and kings of the region, particularly to those aligned with us. Also, bureaucrats naturally think more about the problems and potential blame, than about the potential glory, that attaches to any situation. And it is easy to imagine what could go wrong in Iraq.