People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.

Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today's democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies.

Even today, Singapore does not have the kind of freedom that Westerners regard as democratic. But it is a decent and prosperous society, vastly superior in every way to what it was at the end of World War II.

Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed -- and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist -- has been a needless gamble.

Among those prerequisites are a toleration of different views, an accommodation of different interests, and a willingness to put the national interest above one's own.

The Middle East is the last place to look for such qualities. Such things evolved in the West only after centuries of different religions and peoples trying unsuccessfully to destroy each other.

Many have argued that democracies tend not to start wars, so that having more democracies in the world is in the interest of peace-loving people.

But that is vastly different from saying that we know how to create democracies -- or that so much blood and treasure should be gambled on that long shot.