George Will, the great conservative columnist, is having trouble sleeping, he told hundreds of New York’s top business and intellectual leaders packed into the ballroom of The Pierre hotel Wednesday night for one of the highlights of the New York season, the Manhattan Institute’s annual Walter Wriston lecture. Mr. Will was playing off a phrase of President Wilson, whose sleep was troubled as he was working on post-World War I problems in Paris. The columnist proceeded to deliver to a serious audience generally sympathetic to President Bush a sustained critique of the Bush foreign policy.

Mr. Will was his usual erudite, entertaining, and scholarly self. But for all the tuxedo-clad elegance of the evening, it was hard to miss the moment for what it was — an established conservative star launching an attack on President Bush’s war. “Provocative,” Slate’s Mickey Kaus wrote in a Web posting headlined, “George Will Versus Bush’s War.” Mr. Will went so far as to compare Mr. Bush and his effort to democratize and liberate the Middle East with the bureaucrats in Brussels trying to impose their currency and conceptions of children’s rights on the nations of Europe.

Mr. Will took aim at President Bush for having, in his November 6 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, denounced “cultural condescension.” The columnist mocked Mr. Bush’s statement, “Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are ‘ready’ for democracy — as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress.”

Mr. Will seemed to suggest that some cultures were in fact worth of condescending to, and he proceeded to condescend to Iraq. “Iraq is just three people away from democracy — George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall,” he quipped. He likened Mr. Bush’s ambitions to liberate the Middle East to the actions of the fuss-budget Woodrow Wilson, who redrew maps of national borders at Paris in 1919. “Wilson’s spirit still walks the world. That should trouble our sleep,” Mr. Will concluded.

Our own view is that Mr. Will, for whom we have a great deal of respect and admiration, should drink a glass of port and lie down and read a book. Wilson tossed and turned in Paris after America and its allies had won World War I. Mr. Bush, in contrast, is a commander in chief still engaged in a desperate war that began on September 11,2001,with the two attacks on New York and another on Washington. This war is still very much under way, with the latest enemy attacks, on the British Consulate and on the HSBC bank building in Istanbul, barely a day old.

One could argue that liberating and democratizing the Middle Eastern nations is an ineffective means of victory in the war. But the alternative — “containment,” or appeasement, or negotiating with the terrorists, or sending of a few Scud missiles at empty buildings — was tried during the Clinton administration, and it brought us to September 11, 2001. And while Mr. Will dwelled on the history of Wilson at Paris, he neglected to mention the lapses of those who suggested that various unfree cultures weren’t yet ready for freedom and democracy.

Mr. Bush’s own speech to the NED addressed this very point, though Mr. Will failed to mention it. “After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would ‘never work,'”Mr. Bush said. “Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany are, and I quote, ‘most uncertain at best’ — he made that claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be ‘illiterates not caring a fig for politics.’ Yet when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.”

Or Mr. Will could consider the ancient history of Athens, or the more recent history of Latin America, as Michael Ledeen wrote recently in the London Spectator.

Mr. Will ignored the work of the man that Mr. Will himself called, in an October, 2001 column,”arguably the West’s premier student of the Near East,” Bernard Lewis. In his book “The Crisis of Islam,”Mr. Lewis pays some attention to the misconception that “these peoples are incapable of running a democratic society and have neither concern nor capacity for human decency.” From this follows the notion that “it is not the West’s business to correct them, still less to change them.” Mr. Lewis calls this view “an expression of disrespect and unconcern — disrespect for the Arab past, unconcern for the Arab present and future.”

Mr. Lewis notes that the tyrannies of Iraq and Syria actually operated on a “European model” of a one-party dictatorship — incorporating the worst features of the Nazi and Soviet models. So much for Mr. Will’s sniffing about “Western standards.” Mr. Lewis, in his book, goes on to note that, “In two countries, Iraq and Iran, where the regimes are strongly anti-American, there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments. We, in what we like to call the free world, could do much to help them, and have done little.”

If Mr. Will is still sleepless after having consulted the West’s premier student of the Middle East, he might, late at night turn to one of his own columns, a piece from December 1988 defending the Reagan administration’s decision to deny a visa to Yasser Arafat. It’s a piece that was memorable in its moral clarity. Mr. Will wrote that “in Israel and among Israel’s friends,” there was “anxiety” about the incoming team of George H.W. Bush and his aide James Baker.”This is not because either is ‘anti-Israel,’ but because neither is equipped, by emotional makeup or intellectual capital, to be properly empathetic,” Mr. Will wrote. “Rational policy sometimes needs to be supplemented by a visceral response.”

Mr. Will’s description of the Bush-Baker lack of empathy sounds a lot like what Mr. Lewis calls “unconcern.”The policy of dismantling the terror-breeding regimes is a rational self-defense. It is a visceral response to the suffering of the Arabs under tyrannies and of their victims in the plumes of smoke and carnage at the World Trade Center, in Haifa and Jerusalem, and now at Istanbul.