President Bush struck an appropriate note yesterday in assessing the result of the elections in the West Bank and Gaza. “People were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government,” Mr. Bush said. “The elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories.”

Exactly; the elections were a rejection by the Palestinian Arabs of the circle of Yasser Arafat cronies in which America and the Europeans – and, for that matter, many Israelis – had invested their hopes (and taxes) since the Oslo agreement in 1993. The heirs of Arafat claim that America and the West failed to help them enough. But America, Europe, and Israel lavished billions of dollars in aid on the PLO crowd, every cent of it, in the opinion of this newspaper, a blunder. Aside from the moral issues, it was taken, as our Eli Lake writes in the adjacent columns, in “an international swindle that rivals only oil-for-food.” The money didn’t benefit the ordinary Palestinian Arabs but rather lined the pockets of Arafat cronies and even some of their Israeli business partners.

Had Mr. Bush wanted to offer some additional analysis, he could have spoken of Iran’s funding of Hamas to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, along with funding of Hamas from Saudi Arabians. Not to mention Syria’s provision of a base for Hamas’s leaders. Just as democracy in Iraq is a risky proposition so long as Iran supports Iraqi political parties and Syria and Saudi Arabia send fighters to sabotage progress in Iraq, so too democracy in the West Bank and Gaza is a risky proposition so long as Iran is funding a terrorist group posing as a political party.

We share Mr. Bush’s belief that democracy in the region has the odds in its favor eventually because of the inherent human desire for freedom. And despite Hamas, this is not entirely a negative moment for Israel; the bankruptcy of the Arafat crowd has been laid before the entire world, while the anti-Semitic nature of the Iranian regime and its allies is being illuminated by the tantrums of President Ahmadinejad. The risk for Mr. Bush is that his gradualist approach in the Middle East – Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza first, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran later – backfires. The risk is that the countries that haven’t yet been liberated try to sabotage progress in the countries that have been liberated. The danger of a fanatic Iran with an A-bomb allied with a Hamas state in the West Bank is grave.