President Bush, according to a dispatch in the March 21 number of the Wall Street Journal, has in mind more than changing the country of Iraq. “His dream,” the Journal says, “is to make the entire Middle East a different place, and one safer for Americans.” The story runs under a headline that says: “A Pro-U.S., Democratic Area Is a Goal That Has Israeli and Neoconservative Roots.” The story says, “The idea picked up strength in the late 1990s with the failure of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, which strengthened hawks in Israel and Washington who were advocating more-muscular policies toward the Arabs.”

The dispatch sent us back to our files to pull out a yellowing copy of the first speech by a major leader articulating the proposition that peace would have to await the emergence of democracy in the Arab world. The speech was given at Oxford University in England on October 18, 1991. The speaker — the progenitor of the idea — was a former Israeli general, Ariel Sharon, and we reprint excerpts of the speech in the adjacent columns. The title of the speech was “The Road to a Just World Order — Democratization,” but we run it under the headline “In the Beginning…” to mark the key point. It was Mr. Sharon who first parked this idea prominently in the public debate.

He is not the only politician with over-the-horizon vision. One of his predecessors as premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, has pressed the importance of democracy before a joint session of Congress. The idea has been advanced with great verve by Natan Sharansky, the former prisoner of conscience in the gulag archipelago. It was Mr. Sharansky who advanced this point to Vice President Ch eney at a now famous sit-down at Aspen, Colorado, which led the vice president to relay the essential point to Mr. Bush as the president was preparing his June 24, 2002, speech which scuttled the failed policy of dealing with Yasser Arafat. Mr. Bush held out for the accession of a democratic leader among the Palestinian Arabs.

The Israeli leadership has not always pressed these principles with respect to Iraq. Indeed, the Iraqi National Congress has had to pursue its goal with the notable absence of Israeli participation, a point that was brought home to us in November of 2000, when Mr. Sharon sat down for a dinner with a small group of newspapermen and women. At the dinner, he was questioned about the free Iraqi movement in exile by our Ira Stoll, and he was noticeably detached. Not hostile. But not engaged. His view related to the more general proposition that wars are not usually, if ever, fought between democratic countries.

“Only the rules and tools of modern, Western democracy can provide a perma nent barrier against the build-up of military might, and above all, against mass means of destruction which facilitates aggression,” Mr. Sharon said at Oxford. “Only a democratic regime can constitute a guarantee against pathological armament,” he said. “Only a democratic government can be depended on, with a sufficient degree of certainty, to maintain its obligations for an extended time.” That an idea as Wilsonian as the notion that the spread of democracy reduces the chances of war is being pressed by figures as disparate as an Israeli premier and an American president from the Lone Star state, a Republican no less — well, let us just say it is something to think about.