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Pat Lang discusses our democratization project in Iraq:

Believing deeply in a Utopian vision of human social progress and inclined to think that Israel would be benefited by a Middle East no longer obsessed with a view of the world which involved a moiety of Muslims against all others, the American revolutionaries whom we generally call "neocons" openly called and still call for transformative westernization throughout the region. I would include President Bush and Condoleeza Rice in this group. It is unfashionable to call for "westernization" these days, so the rubrics of "democratization" and "globalization" are applied with the result that great and revolutionary outcomes have been expected from constitution writing and elections. These mechanisms of democracy do not yield the results the "neocons" had hoped for because these mechanisms are not transformative. They are merely expressive of what lies within the collective minds of the people voting.

I really like that last line. Democracy is a process, not an outcome, and it doesn't operate in a vacuum. For kids in my PO101 sections this fall, that will be one of the most basic lessons. Apparently some in Washington never learned it at all.

Using utopian dreams as the basis for your foreign policy is an incredibly dangerous endeavor. I would have thought that was something conservatives understood well.