To be a dictatorship and garner liberal European and American support, all you also need, so it would seem, is to be militantly anti-American. This would seem to be one of the conclusions that can be drawn from positive European and American reactions to the Baker-Hamilton report, with its recommendation that America sit down and start doing business with Iran and Syria.

Remember the good old days when liberal critics of American foreign policy were scathing in their denunciations of American friendliness to dictatorships like Batista’s Cuba, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Salazar’s Portugal, Pinochet’s Chile, and others of their ilk? America, they charged, was hypocritically betraying the ideals of democracy it was supposedly fighting for. In the name of anti-communism it was embracing pro-American but vile regimes that were as bad as any behind the Iron Curtain.

In fact, they were worse, because communist governments at least did some things that were progressive. They educated their citizens, provided free health care, liberated women, etc. The right-wing dictatorships supported by America were instruments of pure repression, with nothing good to be said about them.

And yet when it comes to pure repression, Batista, Somoza, Salazar, and Pinochet had nothing on Hafez al-Assad & Son’s Syria or Khomeini and Ahmadinejad’s Iran. They stood at the head of nonideological, authoritarian regimes that pretty much left their populations alone as long as the latter kept their mouths shut and watched in impoverished silence as their countries were bilked.

This isn’t the case with Iran or Syria. Both started out as ideological dictatorships with totalitarian leanings, like Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, on which their politics and governments were partly modeled. Silence was not enough for them. They wanted popular approval and consent. Although the Syrian regime has by now lost most of its revolutionary zeal, it continues to run a one-party, Baathist state that is less sadistic but no less all-embracing than was Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq and in which all opposition is brutally put down. Iran is still in the zealous stage. Its religion may come from the Koran, but its techniques of political organization come more from the pages of “Mein Kampf.”

But the Syrian and Iranian governments also despise America and are doing all they can to undermine its interests and policies in the Middle East. And they are aligned with forces that are pledged to the destruction of Israel, which the government of Iran has sworn to wipe from the map. This, clearly, puts them in a different category. With dictatorships like these, the Iraq Study Group tells us, America should talk and bargain.

There’s nothing surprising about seeing the name of James Baker on such a document. Mr. Baker has always belonged to a wing of the Republican Party, once its dominant faction, that considered idealism in foreign policy to be as palatable as lemonade in a glass of bourbon. Prosecuting and defending American interests abroad was a game for men, not boys, one to be played as ruthlessly as necessary.

But a liberal Democrat like Lee Hamilton? And not just any Democrat, but the current president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Wilson, the president most identified in American history with the belief that America had both a moral and pragmatic duty to promote democracy in the world, must not only be turning over in his grave, he also must be trying to climb out of it in order to give Mr. Hamilton a piece of his mind.

One can debate the pragmatics of turning to Syria and Iran for help in bailing America out of Iraq. Both countries would probably be glad to try lending a hand if they could strike what they considered to be a good deal. Neither has any interest in permanent chaos in Iraq, and both could live quite happily with any Iraqi strongman who could cow Iraq back into the submission it lived in under Saddam Hussein. The improbability of finding anyone quite strong enough, at this point, to stuff the Iraqi genie back into its bottle is another matter. All Syria and Iran would want in return is a small remuneration — in Syria’s case, the Golan Heights, and in Iran’s, the freedom to make an atom bomb without inconsiderate harassment. And once America is out of Iraq, Israel is off the Golan, and Mr. Ahmadinejad has the bomb — well, God is great, as Muslims like to say when what they really mean is, “Anything goes.” The Syrians and Iranians also don’t believe that foreign policy is a game for boys.

But one can’t really debate the morality of it, which involves, among other things, putting Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, on the block twice: the first time on that of the Golan, and the second time on that of possible nuclear extermination. It stinks.

The most frightening part of the Baker-Hamilton report is the ease with which it dispenses with even the possibility that Wilsonian idealism might play any role in American foreign policy. If the second law of thermodynamics tells us that every action has its equal and opposite reaction, this is the thermodynamics of the invasion of Iraq. Bushian lemonade didn’t work there? Then let’s go back to straight bourbon.

If the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations were to be accepted by President Bush’s liberal critics, it would be tantamount to an official admission that liberals had it wrong all along and that America was perfectly justified in doing business with Batista, with Somoza, with Salazar, with Pinochet, with who knows how many other strutting anti-communist generalissimos. They at least supported America and didn’t call it “The Great Satan.” Lee Hamilton and Democrats who think like him owe them an apology.

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