Listening to the hand-wringing in respect of the birth pangs of the Iraq constitution, one can be led to wonder whether President Bush – who is reported by Reuters to be downplaying the delay – is the only one with a sense of history. He clearly comprehends that America’s own revolutionary time-line spanned the better part of a generation. While it’s hard to draw analogies between our own history and the struggle to secure freedom in Iraq, it’s illuminating to remind oneself of how tumultuous was the birth of the American republic – and how long it took.

One of the best time-lines for America’s emergence is on a Web site of the Library of Congress, which notes that it is drawn largely from the work of Richard B. Morris and his Encyclopedia of American History. The time-line starts in 1764, when Parliament put through what the time-line calls the first law specifically aimed at raising colonial money for the British crown, the Sugar Act. It ends on July 2, 1788, when Congress announced that the Constitution had been adopted and the Continental Congress took its last act, granting 10 square miles of land for a federal town. Even that leaves out the ratification of the Bill of Rights, which became effective in 1791.

In other words, from the start of the struggle until America got its constitution took a full generation. It would take more than a newspaper column to summarize all the thrusts and parries, the act prohibiting America’s colonies from issuing their own currency, the Quartering Act requiring the colonists to quarter their oppressors, the passage and protest and repeal of the Stamp Act, and then the beginnings of the revolutionary Web sites – pardon me, newspaper articles and other correspondence – such as John Dickinson’s “Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania” and Samuel Adams’s Circular Letter and the Virginia Resolutions.

The Boston Massacre didn’t take place until 1770, and the Tea Party in 1773. The Coercive Acts retaliating for the Tea Party came in 1774. Trouble had been brewing for a decade before the sitting of the First Continental Congress in 1774. Lexington and Concord didn’t happen until 1775, and Washington wasn’t given command until June 1775. That was on the 15th. Bunker Hill was two days later. Our Navy wasn’t created until later that year, and the hunt for foreign aid didn’t begin until the end of 1775.

One wouldn’t want to stretch an analogy too far, but that’s roughly where the Iraqi National Congress came in.

It was not until 1776 that independence was declared and Congress authorized the colonies to write constitutions of their own. The war got serious with the Battle of Long Island, commencing a string of enemy victories. Discussion of the Articles of Confederation began in 1777. It wasn’t until a year into the war that Congress established the design of the American flag, and it wasn’t until 1778 that France and America became allies.

The Library of Congress time-line has a nice entry on a flurry of a peace movement – or what one might call an execrable attempt to settle the matter peacefully – that year, when the British, threatened by our alliance with France, sent peace commissioners to America, where, among other things, they tried bribery. The Americans had no interest and the commissioners went home.

Spain didn’t enter the war on our side until 1779. The fall of Charleston, a devastating setback, didn’t take place until 1780. That was the year Congress had particular problems supplying our army and our currency collapsed, triggering a mutiny on our side. Benedict Arnold committed his treason that year. The coup de grace to the British was delivered at Yorktown in 1781, some 17 years after the Sugar Act. It was only the next year, in 1782, that the peace talks, involving the British, French, and American commissioners, began at Paris.

The peace talks resulted in Britain recognizing the new nation and giving up its territory east of the Mississippi. What this ushered in was a dangerous period in which the army tried to get paid and threatened a revolt, only to bow to Washington’s plea for patience. Britain and its loyalists began evacuating New York the following year, and the American army was disbanded. New York was set up as the temporary capital.

In the few years that followed, the new republic saw struggles over, among other matters, territory, the powers of Congress, the regulation of trade, the question of religious freedom. These were serious, one could say existential, questions for the young country. It wasn’t until 1787, some 23 years after the British boot came down on the colonies, that the Founders opened the convention that produced what has become known as the miracle at Philadelphia. Another year would pass before the Constitution was ratified and another before it came into effect.

This is no doubt what President Bush had in mind when he “downplayed,” as Reuters put it, the delay this week drafting the Iraq constitution. No one would want to belittle the urgency of matters in the middle of a war, when people are dying by the thousands. But efforts in the constitutional convention of the Iraqis, Mr. Bush said, “are a tribute to democracy and an example that difficult problems can be solved peacefully through debate, negotiation, and compromise.” History suggests that, even at the speed history moves today, they don’t need to let themselves be rushed.