America is in the awkward position of opposing what amounts to a coup d’état against the elected government of Lebanon, while defending what amounts to a coup d’état against the elected government of the Palestinian Authority.

That is hardly the only contradiction in our Middle East policy. In Lebanon, we are trying to delimit the rise of the Shiites who want a share of power commensurate with their demographic weight in a decades-old system that divides the institutions of government according to confessional communities. Yet in Iraq we are protecting gains made by Shiites who have used democratic procedures to wrest control from minority Sunni who are fighting to take it back.

What explains these contradictory stances by the Bush administration? It is American interests, which broadly defined include, but are not restricted to, the need to stymie the terrorists and advance liberty. The administration has fixated on but one aspect of our interests.

Ironically, neoconservatives, in pursuing the democratization project in the Middle East, have largely ignored lessons taught by one of their ideological founders, Jeane Kirkpatrick. She argued that the key foreign policy failure of the Carter administration stemmed from its self-destructive determination to push anti-communist autocracies toward democracy, without paying due consideration to the most likely outcomes.

In her famous essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in the November 1979 Commentary, Kirkpatrick maintained that democratizing an autocratic society had to take into account timing, conditions of the specific society, and the likely alternative that democracy would produce. She saw the danger of bringing to power revolutionary elements whose rule was inevitably worse than the one just replaced. She grasped that democratization was being directed at societies other than those aligned with the Soviet Union, so that the Kremlin was the net beneficiary of the process.

The essay led President Reagan to appoint her as America’s envoy to the United Nations, presaging the decision by other hawkish Democrats to abandon their party and support President Reagan.

A close rereading of “Dictatorships and Double Standards” underscores the degree to which her view of those times anticipated our own, even if she was speaking for what became a conservative impulse and against what was then a liberal one.

“No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans,” she wrote, “than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.” America might nudge its allies toward democratic reform but not “at a time when the incumbent government is fighting for its life against violent adversaries.”

Kirkpatrick wrote that the attempts to “impose liberalization and democratization” in Iran and Nicaragua “not only failed … but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy — regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.”

Now fast forward to 2006, when, in the service of “democracy,” Secretary Rice pushed hard for the Palestinian elections that resulted in Hamas taking over the Palestinian Authority. By not paying sufficient attention to Kirkpatrick’s critique of liberal policy, America was hoisted by its own petard.

It was Kirkpatrick’s claim that Vietnam should “have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.”

If that was true with regard to Vietnam, how much more so among the Palestinian Arabs and in Iraq, not to mention Hezbollah whose threat of guerrilla war shadows the confrontation in Lebanon. Neoconservatives seem to have forgotten Kirkpatrick’s admonitions about exporting democracy, the salient points of which remain applicable even when the policy is being crafted by her own political students and allies.

Kirkpatrick’s essay faulted Carter administration officials for their “lack of realism about the nature of traditional versus revolutionary autocracies” and for failing to distinguish “traditional authoritarian governments” as “less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.” That same lack now plagues the Bush administration’s policy.

I refer not to the realism espoused by Secretary Baker and Rep. Lee Hamilton or those who want to scuttle American commitments to Israel, but a realism that grasps that Muslim and Arab autocracies, as in Egypt, or monarchies, as in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are, as Kirkpatrick wrote, “less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.” She added: “The evidence on all these points is clear enough.”

This remains true even if the revolutionary alternatives are not communist, but are Al Qaeda terrorists, Iranian Shiite extremists, or jihadists of any other stripe. In other words, for all their monumental failures, a Palestinian government led by Mahmoud Abbas is preferable to one led by Hamas; the Iran of Shah Pahlavi was preferable to that of President Ahmadinijad, and the Saudi ruling family is better than a regime run by the Frankenstein monster they themselves have helped unleash upon the world.

The evidence on all these points is clear enough.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.