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.

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Jonathan Clarke is co-author most recently of America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is a foreign affairs scholar at the Cato Institute.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Monthly.