[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. ]

Historians in the future will undoubtedly find many and varied lessons from the war in Iraq. But we in the present do not have the luxury of waiting for all the evidence to be in before we start to understand what has gone wrong and what has gone right in Iraq.

What has gone right is that the Iraq war is already over.

Our troops won it.

But our politicians may once more lose the peace - and with disastrous consequences for us and for the world....

Nations cannot be built.

You can transplant institutions from one country to another, but you cannot transplant the history and culture from which the attitudes and traditions evolved that enable those institutions to work. It took centuries for democracy to evolve in the Western world. Yet we tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security - the law and order - that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.

Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order....

Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today's democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies....

Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed - and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist - has been a needless gamble.

Among those prerequisites are a toleration of different views, an accommodation of different interests and a willingness to put the national interest above one's own.

The Middle East is the last place to look for such qualities....

Many have argued that democracies tend not to start wars, so that having more democracies in the world is in the interest of peace-loving people.

But that is vastly different from saying that we know how to create democracies - or that so much blood and treasure should be gambled on that long shot.

Randll Reese Besch - 7/26/2007

Yes the 'war' is over,re the demolition of an already destroyed polity from sancions,a previous invasion in 1991 and the bombing of critical areas like water pumping stations and hospitals. All war crimes by the way. The present invasion and occupation are ongoing war crimes that create the very conditions for hatred of us. 'Democracy' out of a barrel of a foriegner's gun is ludicrous in the extreme. And yes 'democracies' do start wars ,just look at the past history of the United States to confirm it. It's the occupation that is lost.

Maia Cowan - 7/21/2007

"What has gone right is that the Iraq war is already over. Our troops won it."

If the Iraq war is already over, why are so many of our soldiers being killed? No sane person would call what's going on in Iraq "peace".

Tim Matthewson - 7/21/2007

But it is good to see that he has rejected the Neocon wishfull thinking, and come down on the common sense side of the Iraq war. The US has tired to export democracy, the Wilsonian vision of the future, and it has seldom if eve worked and it has never works in the midst of a civil war. Hopefully Sowell will expand on this insight!