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The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in acknowledging that Bush and his administration did sincerely desire to achieve a democratic outcome in Iraq. For some 60 years before the Iraq war, American policy in the Middle East had nothing to do with democracy. American policy was based on a principle of malign stability, conducted in the belief that stable dictatorships would guarantee American interests.

The pursuit of malign stability governed America's Iraq policy over the decades, and the results were unusually hideous, given that Baathism is a kind of fascism, and Baathist Iraq was an exceptionally murderous totalitarian state. The pursuit of stability led the US to abandon the Iraqi Kurds in the mid-1970s; to support Saddam against the Iranians in the 1980s; to follow a policy of hands-off, see-no-evil serenity, even in 1988, when Saddam was once again massacring Kurds, this time at a more gigantic level than before, sometimes by means of poison gas, no less. And, in keeping with this same malign policy, the US decided to leave Saddam in power after the 1991 war, even while applying sanctions and conducting a permanent mini-war, in order to prevent the dictatorship from starting up yet another war. The policy of malign stability grew, in short, ever more malign, until, in the years after 1991, we ourselves were inflicting damage on the Iraqi people with our sanctions. Iraqi society fell into a dreadful downward spiral, and the results were ghastly.

Sixty years of this policy produced no stability at all in the larger Arab world, as we eventually discovered. And so, like it or not, the Bush administration announced a change. A measure of skepticism in observing government policies is always a good idea, but, by now, a great deal of first-rate journalism has been written on the American war policy and its implementation, and nothing in any of that journalism, to my knowledge, indicates that Bush and the administration rushed into war with the intention of establishing a new dictatorship, which is what the traditional policy would have required. The refusal to allow the Iraqi exiles to form a government-in-exile and to impose it upon the rest of Iraq after the invasion, the decision to dissolve the Baathist army and thereby remove the only possible basis for a new Iraqi dictatorship - these may well have been foolish moves, tactically speaking. But these were measures that, in the administration's imagination, conformed with the larger goal of encouraging a democratic development - something new, not dictatorial.

What brought about the thousand idiotic blunders that wrecked the hopes for a democratic alternative, then? Let us not assume that just because an American administration harbors a wistful hope, the administration will act efficiently in its pursuit. I have not a doubt in the world that Bush would have preferred to rescue New Orleans, too. The influence of stupidity on history is a consistently underrated factor - a tendency that can be traced back to Hegel, who thought that history itself was intelligent. Still, stupidity can be analyzed, and there are times when ideological elements give stupidity its shape and form, and this has certainly been the case with the ultra-ideological Bush administration. An administration that believed government can't do much good was already prone to act irresponsibly in New Orleans - even if the administration would have preferred to have acted intelligently.

In the case of Iraq, I think that several distinct ideological elements contributed to the undoing of the administration's best hopes. The Bush administration's conversion to the idea of upending the 60-year-old policy came late, and the conversion felt awkward to the president and his top advisers. The White House took a long time to learn how to express the new, democratic intentions, and inarticulateness, combined with the administration's preference for manipulating public opinion, instead of presenting honest arguments, proved to be a disaster all by itself, with a thousand dismal consequences: No one believed a word out of Washington, there were fewer allies than necessary, and so on. And then, having hurriedly adopted the idea of pursuing a new policy in the Middle East, the administration ended up proclaiming a Bush Doctrine that turned out to be incoherent - a doctrine aiming at a democratic goal, but using means that were, often as not, better suited for other purposes.

The administration was in the grip of a belief in magic Hegelianism, which is to say, End-of-History-ism, which allowed the administration to believe that, once Saddam had been removed, democracy was going to emerge without anyone's having to make much effort. This belief was reinforced by the administration's commitment to the same laissez-faire, do-little concept of government that proved so unfortunate in New Orleans, and this led the administration to believe once again that, in Iraq just as everywhere else, the government which governs least is the best government. Then, too, the secretary of defense turned out to be a maniac of the new ideology of "military transformation," according to which high-tech military efforts would suffice to win the war, without large numbers of troops, which was yet another way of concluding that wonderful results would come from modest efforts. This is not to say that the Bush administration wished for other than wonderful results. A good many of the top members of Bush's team had been in power in 1989 as well, and they had overseen the American invasion of Panama, which likewise toppled a dictator; and I think that, in 2003, those same government officials imagined that, just as the Panamanians had risen to the occasion of an American military attack by establishing a fairly commendable democracy in Panama, the Iraqis were going to do the same. And the Panamanians did rise to the occasion; but Iraq is not Panama.

I realize that many people have concluded that, given Iraq's difference from Panama, a better outcome was never within reach, no matter what policy might have been pursued. But this is, by definition, a hypothetical argument, and anyone who clings to the hypothesis does have to recognize, at least, that a good many solid experts thought otherwise, and the solid experts issued warnings about the Bush administration's foolish policies before the war, and they issued those warnings precisely in the belief that, if only the foolish policies could be replaced with wiser ones, better results could be achieved. On this topic, too, on the prewar warnings by people who did think that Saddam's overthrow could lead to positive results, there is now a copious literature.

The most striking of these warnings, in my eyes, came from Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, socialist and a pillar of the anti-totalitarian left - the very man who had been the principal UN administrator or regent in Kosovo at the beginning of the postwar occupation there. In thinking about the overthrow of Saddam, Kouchner drew on a considerable personal experience in Iraq. He recognized the extreme desirability of overthrowing the dictatorship, but he favored doing this in a manner that would have followed the kinds of policies that had turned out reasonably well not in Panama but in Kosovo, during the period of his own UN regency. Kouchner advocated, in effect, an extension of the Balkans policy into Iraq - and this was the position, I might add, of a great many people on the left who hoped to see Saddam overthrown.

Kouchner visited Washington pre-war to offer his advice and even his services, once again as a UN official. But Kouchner was ignored. Similar advice meanwhile came, as we have learned from Bernard Trainor and Michael D. Gordon's "Cobra II," from various high officers in the American military. The army officers likewise wanted to apply the lessons of the Balkans - not just the humanitarian and political lessons, but the military lessons, which those officers, just like Kouchner, had learned firsthand. But they, too, were ignored.

Why did the administration stick so fanatically to its own foolish beliefs, even after the failure became indisputable? This is, to me, a great mystery. Stupidity is one thing, but stupidity that will not budge, year after year? Still, some factors that may have entered into this stupidity aren't so mysterious. Taking a wild guess, I will stipulate that the Bush administration may have been influenced by domestic political factors. By doing less instead of more in Iraq, the administration was bound to avoid riling up the penny-pinching conservatives, and to avoid riling up the isolationists, and, for that matter, the administration was bound to avoid riling up the antiwar left, as well. This ought to be a matter for reflection and self-interrogation on the part of people who continued opposing the war even after the Iraqi people's need for greater aid became apparent. But, to be sure, given the fanatical instincts of the administration, Bush and his team needed no pressure at all to do less instead of more.

What lesson for the future should we on the liberal left draw from all this - apart, that is, from the eternal truth, which we already knew, that irresponsible politicians ought to be kept out of office? I do not believe that, just because the Bush administration has bungled the promoting of democracy, we should abandon the very idea of democracy promotion. The US is too powerful to be a neutral entity - a giant Switzerland with no influence on anybody else. If we in the US are not promoting democracy, we will end up willy-nilly promoting something nondemocratic, which will either have to be dictatorship or chaos (the result that we have actually achieved). Therefore we had better promote democracy. How to do it, though, given everything that has happened? Some of the lessons that have lately become visible are not exactly new. They are the lessons that, as Kouchner pointed out, should have been learned from the Balkans in the 1990s. But there is also an additional lesson, peculiar to Iraq and perhaps to other regions in the Arab and Muslim world, and this has to do with ideological questions.

The disaster in Iraq has consisted of many elements, but the persisting and even growing influence of fascist-like ideologies among the Iraqis has proved to be a main one. In the past and even today, the intellectuals of the democratic world have made very little effort to study, interpret and intellectually demolish the doctrines of Baathism and radical Islamism. It is rare to meet anyone, apart from regional experts, who has even bothered to study the main texts of these doctrines - though it is not at all rare to read apologies for the doctrines in question, and altogether common to read outright fantasies about what those doctrines actually say. We should address these ideologies, then. We should engage in a labor of criticism.

Then again, it's amazing how little has been done to clarify the meaning of democracy. The experience in Iraq ought to remind us that democracy is not just a system of procedures and a matter of institutions. Democracy is, in addition, a worldview, and this worldview needs to be expounded: a worldview based on rationality, criticism, respect for individual rights, and so forth. Democracy, in short, requires liberalism, and liberalism is, after all, an ism, and isms need to be presented, clarified, popularized, and defended. The Bush administration, with its belief in magic solutions, has failed to do this. But neither has anyone on the left taken up the job, which is a little strange, if you think about it.

The intellectuals and the liberal left should defend and promote the liberals and freethinkers of the Arab and Muslim world, the outright liberals and not just the people who are described, not always accurately, as "moderates." We should do this in the same fashion that some of us used to do during the Cold War, when it was common for intellectuals in the West to defend the dissidents of the East bloc. This, too, doesn't happen much today.

Why not? A main reason is that, in the West, an amazing number of people remain biased in one fashion or another against Muslims and especially against Arabs - remain attached to the notion that Arabs cannot reach a level of civilization that is capable of producing democracy. There is a right-wing way of expressing this particular bias, but also a left-wing way, having to do with multiculturalism, which leads people to conclude that if the Arab world is awash in paranoid doctrines and grotesque dictatorships, we mustn't judge anyone harshly, and who are we to say that liberalism and prosperity are superior to tyranny and poverty, and aren't some of those paranoias true, and so on? In this manner, left-wing tolerance and right-wing intolerance end up oddly resembling each other. A first component of our effort, then, should be to shed light on the unfair and cruel assumptions that so many people make about the Arab world, and sometimes about other parts of the Muslim world, as well.

We should have been doing this kind of intellectual work all along. Anyway, we should do it now - regardless of what steps the American and allied militaries take or fail to take in the near future, and regardless of what steps are taken by the diplomats. The soldiers and the diplomats may well end up reverting to the previous policy of malign stability. But our own role should be to advocate something else. Our role should be to clarify the ideas that influence the region. To demystify the demagogueries of mad ideologies. To explain the principles of liberal thought and, in this way, to help lay an intellectual basis for a democratic future. Our role should be to offer solidarity to the authentic liberals of the Arab and Muslim world, who have been horribly betrayed by American and other Western governments and even by the left-wing and liberal intellectuals of the West. This program of speaking about ideas and ideologies and championing the liberal thinkers has always been crucially important for the Middle East, far more important in the long run than anything achievable by military or even by diplomatic means.

Paul Berman is the author of "Terror and Liberalism" and "Power and the Idealists." This article is published by permission from the author.