Credit, deserved or not, goes to the winner.

• Author: Clarke, Jonathan
• Position: Middle East Democracy: Who gets the credit? What are the lessons?

It would be unwise to assume that recent and apparently promising developments in the Middle East are the intended consequences of the administration's policies or that they permanently enhance U.S. interests. Take, for example, the issue of the Iraqi elections, whose relatively successful holding and claimed cascading effects around the region have provided the background for much of today's sense of satisfaction. Those elections took place not because the Coalition Provisional Authority wanted them--the CPA favored a markedly different system of caucuses--but at the insistence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who sensed the opportunity to advance his sectarian interests and found an ally within the Kurdish parties with similar interests of their own.

In many ways, the pattern emerging in Iraq closely resembles that in Bosnia where, in election after election, the various groups--Serbs, Croats, and Muslims have each failed to move beyond voting their ethnicity and where, 10 years after the Dayton agreement ended the Bosnian war, an externally-appointed High Representative still exercises ultimate control. Of course, Iraq may or may not fare as Bosnia has, but our experience in that part of the Balkans does provide a warning of the difficulties in creating a national identity and a firmly rooted democracy.

However, let us posit, for the purposes of argument, that the following political consensus emerges: The Iraq experience demonstrates that the exercise of raw American power in a war of choice can not only unseat an unpleasant villain but also provide a region-wide catalyst for a movement toward American-style market democracy in a region thought inhospitable to the democratic impulse. If this turns out to be the dominant analysis, present and past critics will be awkwardly placed, finding themselves in a similar position to those who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and returned saying that "I have seen the future and it works." In short, those of us who had opposed the invasion of Iraq will feel like chumps, though we will rightly remind ourselves that the debate over whether to bomb Baghdad was always about means, not ends.

The political implications would be far-reaching if the left were again perceived to have been on the wrong side of an age-defining national security debate, as happened somewhat in defiance of the factual record over the Cold War. This perception might unleash a realignment on the left, perhaps...