It has been a week of especially harrowing terrorist atrocity in Iraq. A suicide bomber drove his car bomb into a crowd of children in Baghdad, killing 32. Another detonated a fuel tanker in a crowded market in the town of Musaib on Friday, killing at least 98 people. That attack was one of 11 on Friday, with another wave of attacks following on Saturday and Sunday.

The killings are clearly intended to spark a civil war. The suicide bombings in Iraq have targeted Shiite Muslims, who comprise about 60% of the country's population, but a small minority in the larger Arab and Islamic worlds. The al-Qaeda terrorists may hope that if they can provoke the Shiites into striking back at the long-dominant and now anxious Sunni minority (many of whose religious leaders are indeed guilty of tacitly supporting the terrorists), then the whole Middle East might be drawn into a convulsion in which the jihadis would emerge (they fancy) as the leaders of Sunni Islam.

To date, the restraint of the Shiites has astounded the world. It is a restraint founded on a faith in a different future--and a half-remembered past.

A few months before the Iraq War, I spent an evening Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi at his apartment in London. He was in a nostalgic mood and opened a photo album to show old family pictures. One especially struck me: It showed a group of seven men, all in dark suits. I was looking, Chalabi explained, at the board of directors of the Iraqi Sugar Company circa 1942. The man in the middle was his father, the chairman. He pointed out the other six: This one was a prominent Christian businessman, this one Jewish, this one Sunni, this one Shiite. Chalabi was building to a moral: Iraq, he insisted, had a decent past. It could have a decent future.

Chalabi omitted some ugly facts from this story of the golden past. The year before Chalabi's photo was snapped, a pro-Nazi Iraqi politician named Rashid Ali al-Gillani seized power in a coup and began to bring Iraq into the Second World War on Germany's side.

When the British restored the old government at the end of May, 1941, Baghdad's Muslim majority attacked the city's ancient Jewish community. Some 500 Iraqi Jews were tortured, murdered and mutilated. Jewish women were raped, shops looted, homes torched, and a synagogue desecrated.

A similar--and possibly even more horrific story--could be told about the fate of the Assyrian Christian community in northern Iraq, massacred in 1931 by the Iraqi armed forces.

And yet, Chalabi was not altogether wrong. For almost four decades after the founding of the state of Iraq in 1921, Iraq had a constitution, elections, a reasonably free press, a market economy, expanding public schools, a rising middle class and, above all, reason to hope for a better future. Last week saw the anniversary of the day those hopes were shattered: July 14, 1958.

On that day, the armed forces rebelled against the British-installed Iraqi monarchy. They brutally murdered the last Hashemite ruler of Iraq, the royal family and the pro-Western prime minister--and left the bodies hanging on public view for days.

The army announced it would create a "socialist" regime--which meant expropriating companies and farms, silencing critics and extinguishing free institutions. Over the next two decades, the story of Iraq is the story of coup following coup. Each new regime proved more brutal than the last.

What hope can there be for such a country?

Larry Diamond, an academic expert on democracy who helped write Iraq's provisional constitution, is the author of a new book on the Iraq war, Squandered Victory. As the title suggests, Diamond is generally critical of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. And yet he makes this arresting point about democracy building in newly liberated countries:

"Often throughout history, democracy has been embraced by competing (even warring) political forces as a pragmatic compromise, a second-best alternative when each side realized it could not attain or preserve ... its real aim: total power.

"In this common scenario--which includes not only recent instances of democracy after conflict, such as in El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa and Mozambique, but many earlier transitions to democracy in Europe and Latin America--liberalization follows a period of 'prolonged and inconclusive political struggle' that leaves contending forces fearful or exhausted, ready to agree on new rules of the game."

Few populations in the world today are as fearful and exhausted as Iraq's. Few more desperately crave "new rules of the game." Perhaps they may find them in the old rules that governed their state until this week 47 years ago.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.