Michael Ledeen gives us a good lesson in the recent history of democratic revolutions and urges that we pick up the pace:
It was the beginning of the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Spain inspired Portugal, and the second Iberian dictatorship gave way to democracy. Spain and Portugal inspired all of Latin America, and by the time Ronald Reagan left office there were only two unelected governments south of the Rio Grande: Cuba and Surinam. These successful revolutions inspired the Soviet satellites, and then the Soviet Union itself, and the global democratic revolution reached into Africa and Asia, even threatening the tyrants in Beijing.
The United States played a largely positive role in almost all these revolutions, thanks to a visionary president - Ronald Reagan - and a generation of other revolutionary leaders in the West: Walesa, Havel, Thatcher, John Paul II, Bukovsky, Sharansky, among others.
There was then a pause for a dozen years, first during the presidency of Bush the Elder, who surrounded himself with short-sighted self-proclaimed "realists" and boasted of his lack of "the vision thing," and then the reactionary Clinton years, featuring a female secretary of state who danced with dictators. Having led a global democratic revolution, and won the Cold War, the United States walked away from that revolution. We were shocked into resuming our unfinished mission by the Islamofascists, eight months into George W. Bush's first term, and we have been pursuing that mission ever since.
[T]he defeats of the fanatics in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by free elections in both countries, destroyed two myths: of the inevitability of tyranny in the Muslim world, and of the divinely guaranteed success of the jihad. Once those myths were shattered, others in the region lost their fear of the tyrants, and they are now risking a direct challenge. The Cedar Revolution in Beirut has now toppled Syria's puppets in Lebanon, and I will be surprised and disappointed if we do not start hearing from democratic revolutionaries inside Syria - echoed from their counterparts in Iran - in the near future.
For anyone to suggest to this president at this dramatic moment, that he should offer a reward to Iran for promising not to build atomic bombs, or that we should seek a diplomatic "solution" to Syria's oft-demonstrated role in the terror war against our friends and our soldiers, is a betrayal of his vision and of the Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian people.
Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory.
These are exciting times, but we must not lose sight of the fact that success is far from assured. It will take perseverance and steady resolve to carry us through the inevitable setbacks ahead. Yet who can doubt the rightness of the cause? Who can seriously argue that we should give up, turn around, and go home, that a free and democratic Middle East and a severely truncated terrorist threat is not worth the cost? Who can today insist that our intervention, as clumsy as some aspects of it may have been, was a mistake?
If things fall apart, of course, then there will be recriminations aplenty, but if freedom really is "on the march" and if down the road Iran and Syria become true democracies at relative peace with their neighbors, the Bush administration, despite its mistakes, is going to go down as the most visionary, the greatest, administration in the history of this country.