One of the things that has become clear during this echo of the phony war is the big fear of the left. It is the fear not so much that President Bush will use the war authority that has been handed to him by a bipartisan vote in the Congress. Rather it is a fear that if America goes to war in Iraq we will be victorious, that we will defeat Saddam’s army, that much of Arabia will feel relief at the prospect, and that democracy might actually accede at Baghdad.

The reason this is so frightening to the left is that the left has been wholly out of the struggle for democracy in Iraq, or anywhere else in the Arab world. One can think back to the now-famous speech that Ariel Sharon, who was then in what amounted to internal exile in Israel, gave in the early 1990s to undergraduates at Oxford University. He argued that the route to peace in the Middle East was the spread of democracy.” Only the rules and tools of modern Western democracy can provide a permanent barrier against the build-up of military might, and above all, against mass means of destruction which facilitate aggression,” he said. Leftwing critics ridiculed his idea as but a way of avoiding a deal with the PLO.

It was Americans of a right-of-center or neoconservative bent, not those of the leftwing camp, who, after the Gulf War of 1991, began making contact with the embryonic Iraqi National Congress. The policy intellectuals who played ground-breaking roles in hammering out these ideas included such figures as Secretary Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen, and Richard Perle (now connected to Hollinger International Inc., a member of the limited liability company that owns this newspaper).Towering over them was the visionary Albert Wohlstetter, who has passed away but whose ideas live on. The newspaper that was the tribune of these ideas was The Wall Street Journal.

As the logic of these ideas began to take hold, Congress awakened to the promise they held for an end to the stalemate in the Middle East. In 1998, it codified this logic in the Iraq Liberation Act. It did so on a bipartisan basis, with Senator Lieberman joining such Republicans as Senators Brownback and Kyl in the leadership that brought passage in an overwhelming vote in both chambers. The Iraq Liberation Act — whose preamble establishes regime change as American policy with the force of law — is one of the shining achievements of Congressional idealism.

But one of the striking things about this period is how assiduously the left derided the idea of a democratic Iraq. The New York Times dismissed the vision almost immediately. The CIA, and its ironical cronies on the left, spent much of the 1990s trying to block the implementation of the new law. Thos. Friedman ridiculed the Iraqi National Congress in a dispatch filed from, of all places, Qatar (though Mr. Friedman deserves credit for eventually moving into the war camp). The Democratic president who signed the Iraq Liberation Act, Bill Clinton, abdicated the fight. The American Prospect, the Nation, the post-Lane-Kirkland labor movement, they were all out of the fight.

Now what this group fears above all else is the prospect that a Republican president, George Bush, might actually ride the ideas they spurned and ridiculed to victory. The consequences for the left would be disastrous, much as they were for the America-first, isolationist right after our entry into World War II. Or worse. For come World War II, many of those who had opposed the idea of American entry — Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, for example — became supporters of the war effort. As had many on the left, such as the Jewish Daily Forward, who opposed American entry in World War I, only to become supporters once American boys were overseas.

How did it happen that our friends today on the left, who like to think of themselves as idealists, have not joined the fight to shore up support for the idea of democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world? What a tragedy that they have spent the past few years talking themselves into a corner from which they will have a hard time rooting for an American, democratic victory once the battle is joined and American GIs are slogging across the Euphrates.