Sometimes, when leaders of both political parties agree on something, it is a sign of healthy bipartisan consensus. Other times, it is a sign of dangerous group-think. With respect to the fetish for “stability” in the Middle East, it falls into the second category. Over the weekend, the White House press secretary issued a statement in response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas terrorist leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. “The United States is gravely concerned for regional peace and stability,” the statement said.

And in New York last week, Senator Kerry also called for stability, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times that was brought to our attention by Slate’s Mickey Kaus. “I have always said from day one that the goal here…is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that’s a full democracy,” Mr. Kerry said last week. He reiterated that on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”saying,”It doesn’t have to be, at least in the early days, the kind of democracy this administration has talked about, though that’s our goal and we should remain there. But what is critical is a stable Iraq.”

By our lights, if the Middle East suffers from anything, it is an excess of stability. Hosni Mubarak has ruled in Egypt since 1981. King Fahd has ruled Saudi Arabia since 1982. Hafez al-Assad or his son Bashar have ruled Syria since 1971. By comparison, America — with its change of leaders every four or eight years, and with Republicans and Democrats regularly dueling over control of Congress, is a beacon of instability, though in truth it’s not really the frequency with which leadership changes that defines stability in its best sense but the democratic nature of the system. Or as Kim Dae Jung once said to an editor of our acquaintance, while he was languishing in prison, “No democracy, not strong.”

More to the point, it’s a quick jump from “stability” to the sort of oppression that obtains in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria and that had set in under Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Yasser Arafat in the West Bank and Gaza. Such “stability” breeds the kind of discontent and misery that turns out terrorists. Iraq today is less stable than it was under Saddam Hussein. But even Mr. Kerry would acknowledge that Iraqis are better off without the tyrant in power. America during the revolution was less stable than it was under the British, but few Americans today would say that the patriots were mistaken. It’s something to keep in mind the next time a politician of either party starts talking about the need for “stability” in the Middle East.