Defending tolerance: values liberty, and democracy.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren E.

Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice, by William Galston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 737 Pages, $19

Now THAT THE last smart bomb has fallen and soaring Predators have returned to their nests, it's time to put Iraq back together again. It will be no triumph for freedom if this President Bush's Gulf War ultimately concludes by replacing one defunct tyrant with some other autocratic strongman. Nearly everyone is agreed that Iraq must now join the family of democracies.

Because this is the Middle East, that's easier said than done. But even if somehow the circle gets squared and ballot boxes replace Ba'ath dungeons, that will not be sufficient to ensure the creation of a humane and civil Iraq. The Shi'ite community comprises some 60 percent of the Iraqi population. If it votes as a bloc, it will be capable of imposing its concept of the good society on all the other groups. The tables would thereby be turned on the formerly dominant Sunni community, with the Kurds, as ever, on the bottom. An Iraq with elections, even scrupulously free and fair elections, could easily place itself in the hands of medieval-minded mullahs and archaic ayatollahs.

Democracy is not a new idea. It achieved its first efflorescence some 2,500 years ago in Greece. Democratic Athens was a scintillating experiment in rule by the demos, the people. But things that scintillate are prone to burn out. Under the pressure of an extended military and economic struggle with its great antagonist, Sparta, Athens' democracy imploded. Transient majorities came together in the Assembly to strike vicious blows at political opponents. Scapegoating and treachery abounded. The result was civil strife, defeat by the Spartans, and replacement of the discredited democracy by rule of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. The depressing story is spelled out with unmatched brilliance in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars. For centuries this was the classic text demonstrating the unworkability of democracy.

What was needed to make rule by the people effective was the addition of mechanisms to restrain those people from overreaching and destructively turning on themselves. However, if the restraining agent was something external to the governed, then the regime would be rule of but not by the people. So the democratic conundrum devolved into the question of how a polity not controlled by another could control itself. Division of...