Is It a Revolution or What?

March 30, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording.

Proceedings:
MR. LEDEEN:  Good morning and happy Wednesday to everybody.  Michael Novak is here and will make his appearance in that seat shortly.  The sermon for today is "Is it a Revolution or What?"

I should like to start with a bit of autobiography.  When I was in graduate school I was made to read a book of two volumes by R.R. Palmer who was a great historian at Princeton University at the time, 1897-1898, called "The Age of the Democratic Revolution," in which he pointed out that the last quarter of the 18th century was characterized by outbursts of sometimes successful sometimes failed but in any case outbursts of a democratic revolution in every country in the civilized world.

This was a revelation to me as I think for most people who read that book of pointing out that in the most obscure corners of the world there were attempts at democratic revolution.  And he said so it's fair to call that period the Age of the Democratic Revolution.

Some years ago when I was working in the state department in the 1980s I looked around and said this all looks very familiar as a democratic revolution broke out all over the world even in cases that people are unaware of.  The number on South America, for example, are almost universally unknown, but when Reagan was elected, there were two elected governments in all of South America, Colombia and Venezuela.  Eight years later when Reagan left office there were two unelected governments in the entire region from the Rio Grande to the South Pole and they were Cuba and Suriname.  Every other country had had elections and had duly elected governments, and so on.

Then there was a long pause which prompted me to write a book called "Freedom Betrayed" in which I blamed the halt of this global democratic revolution on two administrations that really didn't care very much about it.  And now surprisingly, it has resumed.

So I just wanted to give you little things from the blogosphere because most of us don't know about these things.

The latest nation to embrace democratic we learn is the mountain kingdom of Bhutan, an isolated agricultural nation between India and China.  The King of Bhutan announced the end of a century of absolute royal rule yesterday with the publication of a draft constitution to establish a multiparty democracy.  By the end of the year, his 700,000 subjects will have elected a parliament and the parliament will have the right to impeach the king by a two-thirds vote.

Then, excuse me pronunciations, two Russian ethnic republics, Ingushetia and Bashkortostan, have seen mass street demonstrations this week directed against Kremlin installed leaders.  Even in Mongolia hundreds of protestors gathered last week to "congratulate our Kyrgyz brothers and demand a rerun of last June's disputed parliamentary polls."

In the other words, in the most obscure corners of the world just as in the last quarter of the 18th century we are seeing attempts at democratic revolution.  There is no corner of the world that is exempt from this.

This has surprised a lot of people.  There are some people who believe that this is somehow not a revolutionary moment, but I stand with the Chinese.  The Chinese have said everything, so one can always footnote the Chinese for any idea that one may have.  But in any case, it seems to be a well-established principle of Chinese historiography that one does not best understand a moment by studying a causal sequence leading up to the particular event you were trying to understand, but the way best to understand it is to try to appreciate the unique characteristics of the moment, and it's the moment that explains what is going on because people are acting within that context and what went before is probably not causally significant, or if it is we don't know what the causally significant ingredients are or may be.

In any case, that's my story and I am sticking with it, and to challenge these ideas and to help us expand our appreciation of this moment revolutionary or not as the case may be, we have four really brilliant people, Laurent Murawiec, Michael Novak, Richard Perle and Michael Rubin.  In our usual way, we will go alphabetically which as luck would have it is a steady progression here.  You're looking at it from left to right.  Laurent, please illuminate ourselves.  I have asked each of these four people to talk for 5 or 10 minutes.  Then we'll go around again to see if there are any disagreements and then ask you what you think so you can ask us to explain what we have said.

MR. MURAWIEC:  Thank you, Michael.  It's always nice to be first, especially if it's by alphabetical order.  What I'm going to try to do is say exactly the contrary of what Michael just said about the moment and what precedes the moment.

I think that if we look at the end of dictatorships or of authoritarian and despotic governments in the last 30 years, there is something that is in common with all the regimes that fell.  Think of the fall of dictatorships like Spain, Greece and Portugal in Europe in the '70s, of a number of extremely despotic East Asian in Korea and Taiwan, of the bureaucratic centralism of India, the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and presently the beginnings of something of the same kind in the Middle East, what is it that is in common in the fall of all these regimes beyond ideologies since among the regimes that fell that I mentioned we found fascists and communists and extreme authoritarian and so on?

So it's not the ideology per se that is in common between them all.  What was in common is that they were all regimes that believed that they own their subjects.  It was a state that considered itself the owner of, I wouldn't say the citizens, it was not citizens, it was subjects.  They were chattel of one form or the other and the regimes thought they owned them.

In order to own them, each one of these regimes had one form or the other of autarchy for goods, for services, for people, for ideas, for money.  In order to own your subjects, you need some form of autarchy.  An autarchy allows you to do one thing.  It allows the ownership of the subjects to be exercised in the form of a police state.  So to one degree or another, a police state was ruling in all or most of these countries.

It was the police state that enabled the rulers to maintain these autarcical countries in what the British author David Pryce-Jones has so well named the closed circle referring to one specific part of the world, but a closed circle it was from which the captive subjects could not emerge.  This is what has been breaking down.  To me, this is the common thread that unites those places that liberated themselves from one form or the other of despotism in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and those nations in the world of Islam that are presently shaking loose or trying to shake loose from the kind of despotism that the Syrian regime, that the Iraqi regime we helped, that the Syrian regime in Lebanon, had imposed, the same goes in various forms and the forms matter little of Egypt and of course of Iran.

So to me, and I think that if I contradicted you I didn't exceed my time, I think this is what matters in the present situation.

MR. NOVAK:  Michael, you reminded me a situation almost 25 years ago, the day after the inauguration of President Reagan in 1981.  Jeanne Kirkpatrick approached me here in the dining room here at AEI and asked me if I would be willing to take the position as U.S. Ambassador to the Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva.  I said, when would I have to go?  She looked at her watch and said within 8 days.  And I said, can I have until tomorrow to think about it?  She said no more than that.

To make a long story short, I was sent to Geneva as the first representative of the Reagan administration with the public announcement that all foreign policy was in reconsideration, was in abeyance.  So for the next 30-some days, you would have thought I had green hair because nobody in Europe had yet seen a Reaganaut and were interested in seeing if I actually wore six-guns and boots and had green hair and so forth.  But it was my thrill to announce then that the emphasis of the Reagan administration foreign policy, there being no word to the contrary, was to promote democracies which was the only sure way of promoting human rights.  They used the phase from Madison that human rights are not protected by parchment barriers, but by habits and institutions.

Nobody believed me for a minute.  There was wide skepticism, but I kept insisting wait and see by the end of the Reagan administration what has been delivered and just by that, and that at least would be our emphasis.  And so enough it did turn out to be that emphasis, and as Michael was suggesting, by the end of a decade, not quite the end of the Reagan administration, but by the end of the decade, there had been a significant movement toward democracies.  By the end of the Clinton administration the number had grown to something like 70 or 80 new democracies.

It's quite remarkable to see a second wave of that starting up again.  It's really just quite remarkable to see it.

It leads me to the notion of revolution that our American founders had at the beginning.  They took the term revolution to mean a turning like a wheel, a return to first principles.  There are certain first principles about human nature and the requirements of human living that while they don't just go round and round, there is movement forward in it, too, that the human race keeps coming to.  So I don't think it's too surprising to see another cycle of this movement.

Another point I want to make about that experience in 1981 and 1982 is that in those days at the Human Rights Commission we I think virtually never got around to any human rights abuses in the Arab-Muslim world.  Very, very seldom.  Thinking back on it now, it was as if there was already too much on the table and too much at state between the Soviet Union and the United States and various allies of each that our attention was limited with blinders, so to speak.

So we look at the world today, and if you look at the Muslim populations of the world, just look at that for one moment, because it's--billion people mostly in Asia but in the Middle East obviously as well, there aren't many populations who so virtually universally have been living under tyranny and in regimes in which the very frequent if not normal method of governments is assassination or coup.  And in which although they are because of the oil wealth extremely wealthy nation in which huge numbers of people, perhaps the majority in some countries, are living at quite impressive levels if not of poverty, at least of lack of opportunity and lack of places to develop their talents and live out vocations that give them a sense of pride, achievement and dignity, living in much poverty than the wealth of the nation suggests they might and much, much lower opportunity.

I want to make two objections about the nature of this change, whatever noun we should put to it, the change which is announced on the front page of today's "Washington Times" in a remarkable interview with the Ambassador of Pakistan about the great sense of change sweeping as he sees it the Muslim world, in fact, the whole world, call it what you will.

What is a very sensible caution is that democracy is a long-term project.  It requires as Toqueville said, a long education.  It requires changes in political ideas and associations and institutions.  It requires a suitable economy.  If all people have as in Poland after 1989 for a year or two from democracy is a chance to vote every 2 years or so with nothing improving economically or very little improving economically, they don't love democracy.  It turns out that to make democracy work you have to have a dynamic economy which doesn't promise heaven on earth, but at least shows some steady progress and dynamism and anticipation that in 5 years or so your family will be better off than today.  It won't be paradise, but it will be better.

Then finally, it requires a change in habits.  Children have to be brought up differently, to be prepared for a life of initiative and responsibility and not of obedience, not of being careful not to violate somebody else's opinion of things.  It's a very different mind-set.  And to be willing to risk all your savings in order to open up a small business when you might very well lose it requires a very different sense of virtue than one in which you hoard and save what you have and live a defensive life.  So normally a democracy takes a very long time and we must expect that to choose to remain in some force.

But there is one countervailing fact which we have learned in the 20th century and it has two aspects to it.  First, there is a very compressed learning cycle for two reasons.  One, what I call the via negative, the suffering that certain peoples have endured in the last 30 or 40 years have been so severe and so intense that they are determined to give democracy a good try.  There has to be something better than what they have experienced.  I think that's partly what we've been seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I suspect we'll see it in other places, where the suffering itself, the nondemocracies, the experience of nondemocracy, has been such a bitter lesson that people are willing to endure a lot more than they otherwise would have been to learn the lessons of democracy and to compress some of the learning cycle as much as they can.

But there is a second reality as well which is compressing the learning cycle, namely, the visible example of other peoples living more prosperous lives with greater opportunity, greater freedom of movement, the ability to take responsibility for their own government and bring about changes in their own government.  People are more and more seeing this not only on television, but in travel, and not only on travel, but in pilgrimages.  Apparently the conversations with people from Iraq particularly, in Saudi Arabia during the hajj, made a particular impact, and that sort of thing is happening all over the world.  I put special emphasis on television of course, but it's not only television.

One last point.  I'd like to make two remarks about Islam.  The counterargument is that Islam is not hospitable.  In fact, some prominent Islamic leaders of the terrorist groups or those close to them have argued that democracy is contradictory to Islam.  I want to make two quick counterpoints.  One, there has been a long streak of practicality in Muslim populations.  They have often lived at considerable peace with their neighbors and people with other religions for very practical reasons.  There is a worldliness that runs through a majority of the Islamic people as among Christians and through Jews.  One ought not to think that because there is a powerful religion setting certain important ideas that everybody within that society is preoccupied with those ideas and makes them central to their lives.  It just doesn't work that way.  It's diffuse through the population in a great many gradations and the practical sense more often than not wins out.

I think we're seeing evidence of that.  I think there is much more of that going on in Iraq and the determination of the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shiia to stay together despite all kinds of tendencies separating them comes out of that practicality.

Then secondly, buried in Islam and not brought forth to the degree it might well have been and not brought forth to the degree it was in Jewish and Christian cultures, buried within Islam is a quite powerful theory of liberty.  A number of Muslim scholars have begun calling attention to that and not only in the younger generation, but over the last 100 years.  Just to speak graphically about it, any religion which has a theory of reward and punishment for individual actions in history has to have a very profound theory of liberty.  It wouldn't make any sense if people weren't free to choose one way or the other.

This has not been developed jurisprudentially and in its political terms nearly explicitly as it was in the West, but it's there to be developed and it is beginning to be developed.  The lines that I see some Muslim writers taking just now is to point out that Islam has already been concretized in many, many different cultures, as far afield as Indonesia and Morocco.  Allah is transcendent and beyond all of these.  He can't be contained within any one of these political systems.  So I'll not identify any one political system with Allah.  It's the sort of relativizing of political systems, and that introduces whole elements of liberty and liberty of choice and movement.

In short, I think there is also whatever we call this that's taking place right now, there is a profound intellectual component to it going on at a very deep level which I think has far-reaching consequences for the rest of this century.

MR. PERLE:  I'm surrounded by people who have written important books and are serious scholars, and so I wouldn't dream of attempting to be scholarly.  I just want to make a few common-sense observations.

I don't believe that given the choice anyone would choose slavery.  There may be an anthropologist present who can find a contrary example, but I don't think people will choose slavery or even a watered-down version of slavery.  There is something inherent mankind that desires freedom, that desires not to be dictated to and that most of all as Nathan Sharansky has observed, desires to be free from fear, that fear that affects every citizen living under circumstances of dictatorship.

I believe we're seeing a revolution and the revolution is expressing itself in disparate places and cultures.  Michael started with some recent examples that I was unaware of.  A week from now there will probably be new examples.  There is something in the water, in the air, and what I believe that is is the discovery of a possibility.

There's an old joke from the community ear about Adam and Eve.  They had no housing, no clothing, one apple to share between them, and they believed they were in paradise in the Soviet Union.  The belief that the world that you're living in is the best that it can be or the best that you can reasonably hope for is a very powerful disincentive to participate in a revolution.  What is no longer possible is to conceal from pretty much anywhere in the world what is going on everywhere else in the world.

So if I had to guess, I would guess that the tsunami of freedom originates in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the very powerful images of the women voting in Afghanistan, of governments changing at the will of the voters, the ink stained fingers in Iraq, and these images have swept away the belief in other countries, particularly in neighboring countries, that freedom is simply not possible.  So what Iranians are saying, what the Lebanese are saying, what Syrians are saying, is why can't we have that same freedom?

Those of us who have complained for many months now about al-Jazeera I think must now be forced to acknowledge that the images conveyed by al-Jazeera of people voting have proved to be far more powerful than some might have imagined and perhaps equal even to the repetition of the images of violence that became al-Jazeera's specialty.

This comes at a moment when we have a revolutionary administration in Washington.  By the way, the Reagan administration was also revolutionary.  Michael and I had the privilege of serving in that administration.  Revolutionary in the sense that Ronald Reagan rejected the idea that the Soviet Union was a permanent feature of the modern world and that it was the task of American policy to figure out how to get along with the leaders in the Kremlin and he proposed and was widely criticized at the time by people who call themselves realists whose intellectual kin continue to think of themselves as realists, was denounced as having crossed a dangerous line in declaring the Soviet Union an evil empire and indeed legitimizing the order of things in the Soviet Union.

We have another president whose intellectual roots are much closer to Ronald Reagan than to a previous Bush administration and certainly the Democratic administrations in between, a president who has been willing to embrace revolutionary ideas, and one of those is the importance of spreading human freedom in the world and I believe that that is resonating not so much by what he has said, but by the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

He has now said, President Bush has said, that if you want to understand my view on this subject, read Nathan Sharansky's book.  I try to make it a point to mention this book because it is rare that a book read by a president has the impact that Sharansky's book, "The Case for Democracy" has had on President Bush.  He's given copies now to his close friends and cabinet officials.  Those who haven't read it by now will.  And it's a powerful book and expresses the argument, the view that not only is freedom inherent in the soul of mankind, but it is the best protection for a world in which unfree societies create internal and external enemies and ultimately cause wars and terrible attacks on their own citizens.

So what should we do?  I don't think there is a lot that we need to do except to align ourselves with those who have been inspired by what they have seen around them, who have discovered the possibility that they don't have to live under the conditions they've lived in the past.  We can align ourselves with them in various ways, politically, morally.  There is no reason why we should shy away from giving them material support.  And there are freedom movements now in every country of importance, and it seems very clear to me that if the president's policy, the president's belief is to be implemented, then we still start to see the cumbersome machinery of our government designing programs to assist people who are fighting for freedom around the world and we should do so without apology, without concern for the Westphalian notion that it's none of our business what happens inside the borders of other sovereign states.  And I hope that as we speak there are people with real power and influence at the department of state and elsewhere who are busy designing programs to assist those people who want to help liberate their own countries.

MR. LEDEEN:  You'll notice that Richard began by promising he would not give a scholarly talk and is the only one so far to assign a book.

[Pause.]

MR. RUBIN:  [In progress] --taking the temptation sometimes to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory to accept what I would call a Potemkin democracy rather than a real democracy for the sake of short-term expediency.

What I would argue the last couple of months have demonstrated is Muslims and others living under autocracy deserve the same right as the rest of us.  A few years ago I had the privilege of having some vacation time and like most normal people I decided to go to Mali in West Africa for my vacation.  As you know, Mali is overwhelmingly a Muslim country.  It's also one of the first poorest countries on Earth.  And according to Freedom House, in the Islamic world it's the country that ranks most free.

It has had several successive changes of government from opposition, and it shows that there is no excuse, no discrepancy, that says because you don't have much natural resource, because you're poor, because you're Muslim that you don't deserve the same freedoms as the rest, and the Malians have proved that they can take the ball into their own hands.  Sometimes it seems these revolutions only happen when the media is present, but as we heard with Bhutan and as we know with Mali, they happen when the media isn't present as well.

Let me go to Iran, and this goes to the idea of whether or not we should accept a Potemkin democracy, just the facade of democracy.  In 1997 people trumpeted the triumph of reformists in Iran.  The news media was present as the president, Mohamed Khatami, was elected, and he was elected over the favored candidate who was at the time Nateq Nori, I believe the Majles speaker, a hard-liner, and it was seen as a triumph of the Iranian people.

But again what the media most often didn't report was that in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, under Article I believe it is 91 and 100 of the Constitution, the Guardian Council has the right to vet candidates, and in the case of Iran, they eliminated 234 out of 238 presidential candidates.

What you saw was a celebration of the desire for change rather than change accomplished because 90-some-odd percent of the candidates didn't have the opportunity to run and they were running on a platform which very likely represented the will of the Iranian people, much more than proponents of the Islamic Republic did.

In 1999, having a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time, I was in Iran in Tehran during the 1999 student uprising.  What struck me, and I identify this as the key moment of change, was when vigilante gangs and law-enforcement forces and other so-called hard-liners attacked a student dormitory, the students were all talking in the street about Khatami will step forward for us, Khatami will step forward for us, against this dictator, Khamenei who is an elected supreme leader, and the fact of the matter is he didn't and it created a great deal of disappointment, of freedom scorned.

But what I worry about looking at U.S. policy after that time is sometimes we lag behind the debate and so we're willing to assign the label democrats to people or reformists after the citizen of that country have long since given up.

One of the impacts as to why this revolution is taking hold now, you'd be a fool not to credit the policy of this administration for standing up verbally, rhetorically and in substance for the idea of freedom and democracy.  There is also the issue--some people disparage this idea of a domino theory.  I'm an historian by training and I have done my doctoral research on technology and the spread of technology in the Middle East in the 19th century with particular attention to Iran.  When I looked at old telegraphs and old telegrams during the time of the 1906 revolution, the constitutional revolution in Iran, the Iranians were very conscious and were following on a day-to-day basis, you can read this in old Iranian newspapers, of what the Russians were demonstrating for in St. Petersburg in 1905.  It's not a coincidence that when the Russians got their Duma, the Iranians also stepped forward and said we've had enough with absolute monarchy, we want the same freedoms.

The Russian and the Iranian freedoms of a century ago weren't the same that people are demanding now, but the linkages are there.  What the telegraph did then the Internet does now, and we see this almost every day with the blogs from Syria.  Syria can try to crack down on the Internet, but the fact of the matter is Lebanon has always been the economic escape valve and people can simply dial into Lebanon.  People can change phone numbers to get access to servers and so forth.  People can use phones and satellite TVs to get around the restrictions.

I was in Iran once having dinner with a family back in 1996 when a phone call came in from a country that Iran doesn't recognize, but the fact of the matter is, people can use various switchboards in European countries to get around such censorship and restrictions.  I would argue that the spread of the Internet and impact of the Internet is a good reason to keep the United Nations away from the Internet because what we're seeing now is the result of people having freedom.  Liberty extends not only to politics but to the freedom to communicate and to share ideas, and that should never be restricted.

About 2 or 3 weeks ago I was in Saudi Arabia in Jeddah and one of the things that struck me, and I want to build a little bit on what Michael Novak had said, was the idea of pilgrims and the idea of people moving and of business.  I was spending some time in Jeddah and what struck me was the Lebanese in Saudi Arabia.  It would be wrong for the Americans to be triumphalist too much about the idea of democracy.  After all, as I believe all the panelists agree, it is a fundamental liberty which people strive for and the Iraqis who showed up to vote, we may have enabled a template for change, but they were the ones who showed the courage and stepped forward, braved bombs and bullets, to do it.

Likewise in Afghanistan.  If you read the newspapers in the week or two before the election in Afghanistan, people are talking about making the streets flow with blood.  The Taliban was threatening the Afghans left and right.  Workers were killed.  So on the day of the election at 8:00 or 9:00 Kabul time, no one knew if when they went to the polls whether or not that would be the last day or their hour.  But they showed the courage and we need to applaud that.

The Lebanese have shown extreme courage, and when I would talk to the Lebanese in Jeddah, Jeddah is a microcosm, but the Lebanese and the Lebanese business community is spread throughout the Middle East, these are the people.  Our diplomats aren't the ones.  The Lebanese are the ones who are standing up to the Saudis and saying we need democracy and there's nothing wrong.  Don't label this a foreign idea.  This is something which we want in Lebanon and it's something which people should want in Saudi Arabia as well.

I do get worried when I look at Jeddah is going to be having municipal elections and when I look at the election brochure they're passing out, I do get a little bit cynical when it starts off in Arabic, "Elections can mean different things to different people," which is the way the Saudi brochure started out.  And many of the Saudis, Saudi reformists, the Saudi journalists, also brought up very good examples about why we can't settle just for a veneer or a patina of democracy, but why we have to strive for the real thing.

The question the Saudis raised themselves was if we elect the municipal council and if that municipal council decides that they want to build a [inaudible] in Jeddah, do they have any ability to carry that through, and the answer is no because they would have to take resources, allocations from the central government and there is no guarantee the central government is going to allocate money to perform the will of the people.

So this is one area where there is coming constitutional crises, we have to be on guard.  We shouldn't celebrate prematurely.  Without a doubt there is a revolution, and that revolution isn't just that people want democracy, the revolution we need to have now is for the West to realize that everyone is deserving of liberty, and with that I'll end.  Thank you.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.  A couple of things struck me in this go-round.  The first is how easily and totally the world has adopted the notion that the desire to be free is universal and that you can have democracy anywhere, whereas just a couple of years ago all the experts or just about all the experts were saying democracy is good for some kind of cultures but not for others, there are some people who don't want democracy, they're happy being governed by their tyrant so forth.

And there were others saying there are all kinds of different cultures, there are traditions which are hostile to freedom.  That all now has gone away, but we should remind ourselves that on the eve of Afghanistan and much more so in the endless run-up to the liberation of Iraq, most experts, most Arabists both in the government and out, were saying to us, on this crazy dream about democracy for Iraq, this is insanity.  That's a part of the world that has never had it, people who have never experienced it, and if crazy Rumsfeld or crazy Cheney or whoever it is thinks that you can have democracy in an Arab country, forget about it.  It's just naivete.

Some of us tried to say to them nobody had freedom before they had it.  Freedom was always new at a certain moment.  There was always a dramatic transition from tyranny to freedom, and that's happened in every country on Earth, the ones that have it today.

But it's striking to me how quickly everybody has bought into the notion that freedom is universal, and I must say that this is a great triumph for the American vision of the world, is it not?  It's our revolutionary tradition.  It's individual rights.  It's the individual people must decide how they're going to live and so forth, so that's one.

The second is what Michael alluded to towards the end which is that these things are not irreversible.  Some revolutions succeed, other revolutions fail.  Lots of revolutions have failed.  History is full of failed revolutions.  My starting example in the 18th century is that most of those democratic revolutions failed.  In fact, you can argue that in that entire period from 1770 to the end of the Napoleonic wars, the only revolution that really succeeded was the American revolution, and maybe Switzerland.  Most of you probably don't know about the Swiss revolution of the 18th century, but that succeeded pretty well.

France's failed, Poland's failed, Spain's failed.  The French for a long time used to brag about the French Revolution is the only legitimate revolutionary model and have finally come to recognize that the French Revolution was a failure.  The monarchy was reinstalled.  There was a restoration.  They had to go through another century nearly before they started to get republican government and the kinds of freedoms that we saw.  It's all very fragile.

Two questions really fast if we can if we can do this all in 15 or 20 minutes, the four of you.  Number one, what do the free nations of the world need to do to ensure success and durability?  What are those things concretely.  Secondly, what do we or should we do in cases where we see that there is a desire by a people to be free but it's not working, it's not happening for one reason or another?  The president said with regard to at least two specific cases, if the people there show a desire to be free, the United States will stand with them.  What does that "stand with them" mean?  What are our obligations if any?  So I would go reverse order.

MR. RUBIN:  I'll give a few specific examples.  We should never hesitate to fund directly.  We've got to break down this idea that relations between governments means relations between our officials and their officials.  Dialogue can be positive.  Dialogue can also have a price in the case, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran.  If you choose to have dialogue with the people who are part of the system which most Iranians have now become disillusioned with, in effect you're empowering that regime.

We're making the same mistake we made in 1953 and 1979.  We should never hesitate in many of these countries to support individual groups, labor unions, for example, and other groups who are struggling for their own freedoms against an elite which in many of these dictatorships, be it Iran, be it Syria, be it in Egypt, maintain control of the economic system for their own enrichment at the cost of the well-being of their citizens.  We should support directly those people.  We should not hesitate to support people who have the courage and the strength to get up and to stand up for their rights.

Maybe in the short-term it will antagonize some of our interlocutors, but there should never be a presidential speech or a state department speech regarding Libya that doesn't mention the fact that Fathi El-Jahmi, a Libyan democracy advocate, is still in prison, and according to a recent interview with independent physicians, is in worsening condition.  We should not forget the fact that Ahmed Ebadi who many of you remember from standing up on "The Economist" cover with the bloody shirt back in 1999 has been in and out of prison and his medical condition is diminishing.  When unfortunately recently the state department offered incentives to Iran, they did not in that same speech mention a dissident, they did not mention democracy.  It wasn't just what they said, it was what they didn't say.  They took off the table Iran's support for terrorism, implicitly, this is what the Iranians heard, and support for individual democrats and dissident striving to be free.

We need on a micro level to start supporting not civil society because it calls itself civil society, but civil society which is truly independent.  We should work to ensure that we're dealing with individuals and not governments.  When it comes to Libya, when it comes to Syria, when it comes to in some cases the Iraqi Kurds and other Iraqi groups, often times those that all themselves nongovernmental organizations are indeed very governmental and we need to be a lot more nuanced about this.

As a practitioner when I worked in the coalition provision authority, sometimes it seemed that people would give money away without asking specifically how this program advanced democracy, how this program advanced freedom, because often times the matrix for success in our government, especially in USAID, is how much money is allocated rather than what results one gets for that money.  With that I'll step back and turn the floor over.

MR. LEDEEN:  Our topic is "Is this a Revolution or What," and I think we all agree that is the makings of a revolution among people who have now seen by what is going on around them that there are possibilities for self-governance that they may not have believed existed before.  And it's been observed and people are acting on the observation all over the world.

But there are some places where the message is muted and they are not those parts of the world where freedom doesn't exist.  They're in bureaucratic institutions in those parts of the world where freedom does exist.

The diplomatic profession is not attuned to encouraging revolution.  On the contrary, it is focused narrowly on state-to-state relationships, government-to-government relationships.  It is broadly accepting of the relationship between governments and their own citizens.  In deference to the importance they attach to the relationship between our government and theirs, whichever that may be.

It is not true only of American diplomats.  It's true of French, British, German and Japanese diplomats.  I have to say that I think the dominance of diplomatic bureaucracy stands in the way of the freedom revolution, but it need not be like that.  It is possible to encourage change in the thinking of the bureaucratic institutions that are the principal means by which we engage efficiently with other countries around the world, and I believe we should be doing that.

Michael asked what can free nations do to assure success, and I think that the first answer is get the governmental institutions in a position where they are sympathetic to this revolution and they consider it part of their professional responsibility to encourage it.  That will not happen by default.  It is going to take a degree of activism in a number of governments.

The Europeans are hopeless on this up until now which is why Michael was referring with disapprobation and for good reason to the way in which the British, French and German diplomats have chosen to approach the government of Iran.  It's hard to imagine what a large discouragement it is if you are a young Iranian desperate to find ways to bring some measure of freedom to your country when you see Jack Straw shaking hands with the oppressors in Tehran.  And if you talk to any participant in the democracy revolution, they will tell you the same thing, that nothing is more damaging than to see a congenial relationship between the oppressors and governments that ought to stand for freedom.

So I think the first message that needs to be delivered, needs to be delivered to the bureaucratic and diplomatic establishments in free nations that there's a revolution underway and we should be joining it and not ameliorating it.

MR. NOVAK:  When I married his daughter, my father-in-law was living, he is not now, but he was a lawyer in a small town in Iowa and a very practical man.  I was studying the history and philosophy of religion at Harvard.  He thought very little of Harvard and really less of the history and philosophy of religion, and he didn't see much of an income for his daughter in that I have to say.

He used to refer to me as his on-in-law the celestial physicist and tell me at least twice a year, Michael, if you can't do it, teach it.  So he would be surprised to find me being asked a practical question, Michael.

If you think back to how the democratic revolutions happened after 1989 and of course in the years before then and particularly to the testimony of people there, one of the things they needed over a 10- or 12-year period, I'm thinking of Poland right now, was space, just physical space where dissidents could meet together and discuss.

One of the roles of Wojtyla in Poland was in fact to open up the churches to this, that believers and nonbelievers alike had buildings and they were protected.  These discussions went forward and if they were defeat the failure that had preceded in the '50s of a revolt where the workers and the intellectuals went different ways and it fell apart, they brought the intellectuals in together with the unions and others.  You need space for those discussions to go on.

Second, you need ideas.  The ideas of democracy particularly as we understand it are not intuitive.  They're counterintuitive.  You would think that order would be better under one ruler who could make clear decisions and simple decisions, but one ruler always gets things wrong.  That's why you need checks and balances.  If you have an instinct that it's characteristic of people to miss a large chunk of reality, you need to have other voices in the mix just to get it right.  Pinochet, for example, destroyed small business with single-minded decisions made on certain economic grounds but not realistic economic grounds.

So a lot of the ideas of democracy are counterintuitive and you have to talk right now--as I understand it in Iraq there are tremendous divisions in a fairly straightforward manner of choosing positions in government.  They've got huge substantive decisions waiting in line behind it.  It reminds me of a story that the Pope used to tell about Poland back in the early 1990s.  Remember in one election and I don't remember the year, there were 39 political parties lined up for an election in Poland.  One of them was called the Beer Drinker's Party which was making a mockery of the whole thing.  The Pope said there shaking his head at dinner once, There are only two solutions to the Polish crisis, the realistic solution and the miraculous solution.  He said, the realistic solution is of Our Lady of Czestohowa, the Patroness of Poland who always comes to the rescue of Poland, should suddenly appear with Jesus and all the saints on one side and Moses and all the prophets on the other side and solves the Polish crisis.  That's the realistic solution.

He said the miraculous solution is if the Poles will learn to compromise.  Compromise is not an intuitive idea.  The notion is you're betraying our principles in most languages and in most cultures.  But the notion if you're going to make progress in a democracy, nobody can win everything all the time so you have to be satisfied with gaining a little bit and be sure that everybody gains a little bit and move forward.  That's not an easy idea to get ahold of.  You need ideas.

And the last thing you need information, you need the light to shine in with information about what's happening elsewhere, what succeeded elsewhere and finding a search light on.  One of the great roles the Pope played in Poland and Eastern Europe generally is the priests got beaten up by the thugs, the communists, it was no longer hidden.  It would be all over the world because the Pope would call attention to it.  They couldn't get away with anything quite suddenly and it just transformed the eternal light.

We need a search light on Iran and other places, too, so that when people are beaten up or imprisoned they can't get away with it.  The effect of that is just ignore it.

So there are some preconditoins to put in place which Reagan found a way to do.  Of course, we had Lane Kirkland of the labor unions and we had Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.  We had lots of instruments ready at hand which we don't have in the same measure today, but we could recreate them.

MR. LEDEEN:  We have more of them.  We have bloggers, and we have lots of them.  In fact, it's interactive now in a way that it never was before.  So from that standpoint I think we're better off than we were then.  Laurent?

MR. MURAWIEC:  What we need to do to start with is what Ronald Reagan did towards the Soviet Union which was to maintain relentless pressure, and today we have to keep relentless pressure on the key players in the entire Muslim world.  We put extraordinary pressure on everybody by getting into Iraq.  The results are clear outside of Iraq as well as within Iraq.

Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, even this amusing masquerade of municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, are all the result of the extraordinary pressure that we've put upon the entire Middle East region by being ourselves in the middle of the Middle Eastern region and having said, no, we do not exempt the Arab world, nor do we exempt the Arab and Muslim world from the common rules of civility, one of which is democracy.  So I think we should do that.

Sometimes the way to meet people's desire for freedom is to do what Franklin Roosevelt did, and it entails going to war.  Many times it is not war that is the answer, but a combination of many other things which I encapsulate in the notion of strategic pressure.  Mind you, there are a number of countries that come to mind as the objects of our solicitude, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in particular.

How do we encourage, how do we support besides those who want freedom in the Arab and in the Muslim world?  I was thinking of something that played a great role alongside Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the Cold War and that was the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was an Euro-Atlantic forum whereby at a time when communism was the ideology of the future, when it was triumphant where 35 percent of the Italians or of the French were voting for communist parties, at a time where the seemingly inexorable events of history were going the way of communism, the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was Arthur Koestler, Ignacio Silone, James Burnham, Raymond Aron, and the "Encounter" journal in London, the Congress for Cultural Freedom offered a forum, gave a voice, was a loudspeaker, for those political intellectuals who had not resigned themselves to the triumph of communism.

If we look at today's world of Islam, there is a silent minority which I do not think I'm able to quantify, but a strong silent minority that is not resigned to the victory of radical Islam, that doesn't think that jihad and deadly fatwas are the way of the future.  It seems to me that on our part, to give a voice, to give a voice to those dissidents would be of the greatest importance.  So it's a pet project of mine that we ought to be recreating something like the Congress for Cultural Freedom extended by all means to the entire Muslim which encompasses the three Asian countries which have the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia, Pakistan and India, as well as the rest of the world, non-Muslim Asia, and that once the dissidents, the freedom fighters, in the various countries where freedom is oppressed or inexistent, once they were able to rely upon the systematic support of such an organization and such voices as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, then we would enhance their chances of triumphing.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you all.  The floor is yours, Max.  In theory we have microphones roaming the room.

MR. SINGER:  Max Singer, the Hudson Institute.  Speaking as a strong supporter of democracy, I'd like to formulate a little bit the contradiction or the problem that's come up in some of this by making a distinction.  One way is to say it is between overthrowing tyranny and achieving democracy.  Another way to say it is everybody wants democracy, but everybody wants wealth.  The problem is to know enough to be able to do it.

So the first stage of the problem is getting rid of the tyrant, and then as we've seen particularly in South America and maybe we are seeing in Iraq now, although I'm pretty confident that it will come out all right, that you get democracy, that tyranny is gone.  In South America the problem I think is that there is not an elite class that understands the idea of working for the country so they aren't able to put together a government that can do any good, and then the question comes, what next?  So there's a new round of the problems.

MR. LEDEEN:  The question is?

MR. SINGER:  And the problem is now--

MR. LEDEEN:  No, your question is?

MR. SINGER:  The question is, how do we decide how far to go and how do we help build democracy and not just to overthrow tyrants?

MR. PERLE:  It's an important distinction, and those of us who are eager to see the spread of democracy have in some cases also been eager to remove the obstacles to the spread of democracy, and that has included some notable tyrants.  This has led to a caractature of our thinking that is stated in various says:  we believe that you can impose democracy by force.  I don't know anyone who believes you can impose democracy by force save perhaps in some historical cases of an occupation following a war that was defensive in character.  But certainly the removal of obstacles may sometimes be the only way you can open the door to democracy.  You had to be rid of Saddam Hussein or there was no hope for democracy.  It was Saddam forever and his sons after him.

You can't in my view create a democracy where the citizens of a would-be democracy are not prepared to fight for that which is one of the criteria that should affect where, when and how we exert what ultimately are limited resources in support of democracy.

Another characterization is that we favor democracy everywhere and would bring down regimes everywhere.  You have to make judgments about where there are reasonable prospects for success.  I think Iraq was one such place.  The test in part should be the intensity of the desire to establish democratic institutions on the part of the citizens involved and that has now been very clearly established in Iraq with the Iraqi elections.  People risked their lives to vote and in large numbers.  So that's where we should devote our resources.

MR. RUBIN:  I've used this example before, but when I spent the academic year teaching in northern Iraq back in 2000 and 2001, I was lecturing in Iranian history at the Iraqi-Kurdish Universities and my translators were all trained at the University of Baghdad.  Of course, northern Iraq wasn't under Saddam Hussein's control, but their education had been.

In the course of my year lecturing there were certain terms that people just didn't get, compromise, tolerance and debate, and it took some time.  I would have to explain what these terms meant because people weren't aware of them.  I have been very critical of the coalition provisional authority in Iraq, but the fact of the matter is, that interlude did allow Iraqis to meet each other because autocracies are about control, not about free dialogue, to learn to compromise and so forth.

The point there is that democracy is a process.  It's not simply overnight you have it, which means we need to keep up the fight, we need to keep up the pressure, we need always to maintain forward momentum because the second it looks like we're wavering, then we move backwards.  Democracy is not one man, one vote, one time.  It's not about Algeria.  It's about an extended process of compromise, of tolerance, or not shifting parameters, and in maintaining the forward momentum.

MR. LEDEEN:  Thank you.  We have a million questions.  Let's take one here.  I want to try to jump around to different parts of the room.

AUDIENCE:  [inaudible] former State and DOD.  The state department plays a vital role in executing and implementing the president's foreign policy.  Yet a few years ago the Hart-Rudman Commission concluded that the state department is a crippled institution rarely speaking in one voice.  Newt Gingrich 2 years ago elaborated on that, suggesting that the diplomatic corps is impervious to presidential control and directive.

If that's the case, then why haven't the state department reformed, and what can we do to make it happen?

MR. LEDEEN:  If I can suggest that there is no living person who knows the answer to this question?  With your indulgence I want to finesse this question by saying that we are all living proof of Max Weber's terrible prediction that bureaucracy would win, and we are living in a world in which bureaucracy has won and we have to fight that all the time every day.

MR. HEIT:  Stefan Heit (ph) from Zeiss (ph).  I have a quick question about Egypt.  In Egypt one of the main opposition groups is the Muslim Brotherhood and they were calling for religious freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and gathering.

My question is, if they are one of the main opposition groups, they would deserve all the support that you have been claiming for other opposition groups in other countries which do not have democracy.  If it's in the United States interests actually to help such a group come to power if they represent the majority, so that could mean shifting U.S., $2 billion from Mubarak maybe to the opposition groups, but that might be a dangerous case because as the Muslim Brotherhood is not known for their democratic credentials, so advancing freedom, advancing such a group might mean that there is only one connection and not any more.  How do you bridge that contradiction?

MR. LEDEEN:  I think you did it yourself by saying that they are not a democratic organization and that it's preposterous to ask the United States to support antidemocratic organizations, so we would oppose them.

MS. LUMMOX:  Liliana Lummox (ph), Caliber Associates.  I'll go back to Michael Rubin's comment about support.  Growing up in the Cold War in Romania, I do know that when you do support, and if the United States comes in support of someone that may be promoting democracy, often it's the kiss of death for that person because it just gets used against them by the local authorities.  How can you support them but not encourage or give ammunition to the authorities to say the Americans are supporting them, therefore they lose legitimacy?

MR. RUBIN:  I'd say that often times that argument from my experience within government becomes an excuse for not really trying to do anything.  One of the arguments I would make first of all, by nature being a dissident, dissidents are people that have already proved on their own their courage and their commitment to freedom.  That's number one.

Number two, often times it seems that the U.S. government or certain bureaucracies within can be obsessive about personalities.  What I would argue for the cause of advancing freedom, it's sometimes more important to concentrate on building a template where people who do have courage can step forward.

For example, no matter how many billions of dollars we pump into the Central Intelligence Agency, and no matter how hard they may seek to identify the next leaders, the fact of the matter is, in Tiananmen Square none of them knew who that guy was who was stepping in front of the tank and stopping the column of the tanks.  The important thing is to concentrate our efforts on creating a template where people don't have to fear unfair labels.  They don't need to fear stepping forward.  They don't need to fear speaking their mind, or even if they do need to fear it, they feel that the price in their case is worth it.

Just one last point.  Sometimes people will argue that it's the kiss of death.  At other times it is remarkably empowering.  There can be a mystique about support, but the fact of the matter is, support shouldn't just mean America, and this goes to what Richard and others have said, support should be the entire group of free nations.  We shouldn't talk human rights if we don't mean it.  I'm afraid sometimes that's what other governments do.  We need to support human rights, and it shouldn't be an American claim to support Libya, it should be a Western claim to support Libya, and we shouldn't apologize for our principles.

MR. MURAWIEC:  A few words to the kiss of death.  As if all these regimes hadn't liberally been distributing death without kisses to their subjects.  And secondly, there's a counter-example of many, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Sharansky, Aung Sang Sui Kyi, even though they had to pay with prison, some of their friends like in Czechoslovakia, the philosopher Jan Patocka and others with their lives.

From the moment that started not only giving a kiss but being serious in showcasing, highlighting, campaigning, putting pressure, then it is not a kiss of death, and then the man in Tiananmen Square becomes much more powerful.

MR. LEDEEN:  Yes, just one additional comment which is we should trust them.  It's their decision, their country, their democratic revolution.  If they come to us and say we want your support, we must give it to them.  And if they say to us we want that support openly, we should give it to them openly.  If they say we want to have it discretely, we should give it to them discretely, but it's their call.  It's not decision.  It's not our revolution.  We are supporting them.

MR. WEST:  John West out of the Discovery Institute.  One concern in Lebanon that I have is that let's assume that the Syrians do finally withdraw, that you're left with Hezbollah having more power militarily than the army and that they get IRA type status where they have representation in parliament without disarming.  What prospect do you see that we could get the Europeans and particularly France to support us if we take the position that Hezbollah has to choose, and if Hezbollah does choose to fight, how realistic is it that we would be willing to provide necessary assistance to the Lebanese to combat that?  Or alternatively, if they disarm can we verify that they stay disarmed?

MR. RUBIN:  Just a quick thought on that.  First of all, Syria is what empowers Hezbollah.  That's number one.  So if Syria withdraws, Hezbollah suddenly doesn't have the power and stature it just had.  When one looked at the demonstrations, first of all, not all demonstrations are equal.  If you go back to Mussolini, I'm not sure that the bussed-in demonstrators were representative of free will, and I would draw a parallel to the Hezbollah.

Likewise, with the freedom counter-demonstration we saw an instance of obviously a number of Shiia were part of that counter-demonstration for real freedom and real democracy.

All too often our policy in the past has allowed state actors to avoid responsibility by allowing them to operate by proxy, and the fact of the matter is, we can't have Syrian troops withdraw and then engage in bombing or have agents engage in bombing and not hold Syria responsible for that.

Lastly, one of the most interesting things to me was Hezbollah both among its audience on al-Manar Television and also among the intellectual leftist elites, the chattering class of Europe, would often paint Hezbollah as an anti-imperialist movement.  When the Lebanese watched that demonstration, what Hezbollah was demonstrating for was imperialism, plain and simple.

With regard to the French, they've been amazingly helpful in this regard.  They've been amazingly helpful in calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon.  We shouldn't take a step backwards.  The French have finally made the decision to ban al-Manar Television which when actually watches it as I often do when I'm in Iraq and elsewhere, it's pretty scary stuff.  And so it's disappointing to think that a group which has openly called for terrorism might be recognized as a political force because responsible politics and responsible politicians are able to win the battle of ideas through the ballot box and not by blowing up opponents.

MR. LEDEEN:  I would have expected Michael by now to point to Iranian support for Hezbollah which is an important factor.  It's a combination of Syria and Iran.  The Hezbollah numbers are not terribly impressive considering the extent of the outside support they have in contrast to other Lebanese who have no outside support.

So I'm not as concerned as the question suggests about Hezbollah and Hezbollah's durability.  I think it is important that we and the Europeans be unified on the subject of Hezbollah and in particular on the relationship between Hezbollah and Iran and Hezbollah and Syria.

MR. RUBIN:  If the U.S. had a state department devoted to events in U.S. interests, we could have a smart policy with respect to the question of Hezbollah.

Look at Chirac.  He got into trouble because his Syrian friends killed his best Lebanese friend, and at that point Chirac had to choose between his Lebanese friends and his Syrian friends and he actually chose.

The Saudis were mightily annoyed because Rafik Hariri was a Saudi citizen and an asset to Saudi Arabia, personally of Crown Prince Abdullah, at which point the crown prince got extremely not amused and Saudi Arabia started putting a lot of pressure upon Syria, not far enough, but that's where we ought to be smart and get the Saudis to put even more pressure on the Syrians.  At the point that the Syrians get a lot of pressure not only from us but from the French and some friends of the French and from the Saudis, et cetera, we isolate not only the Syrians but the Iranians, et cetera.

MR. LEDEEN:  I want to jump in for a second because we have time for one more question.

The fact is that where we obviously must stand in that part of the world is that we want an end to those tyrannical regimes in Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and so forth, because we know that as long as they are there we will keep having to face questions like this because they will keep on meddling and they will keep on supporting anti-democratic forces which is also an important response to the Egypt question earlier.  It's a revolution in one country for those few comrades left who remember this language.  Who gets the last question?

AUDIENCE:  Several of the speakers have talked about the sense of a better life being possible elsewhere as one of the animating factors of these changes.  Once we begin to see the democratic changes, how do we sustain them?  Because the changes that people are looking for in terms of prosperity are not going to happen very quickly.

I have a related question which is that the largest country in the world has not actually been in the table here, and that is of course China.  Here we have increasing prosperity and some increase in property rights, maybe what come people might call the Potemkin approach, but no change at the top.  How does democracy come in a situation like that?

MR. LEDEEN:  Michael, this is clearly for you.  On China, notice that 570,000 people have resigned from the Chinese Communist Party in the last few months, so not even China is untouched by this.

MR. NOVAK:  I was going to make a comment just a moment ago on the last question which will now fit given Michael's comments.

We shouldn't underestimate the role of the change of minds of personnel within militant forces, especially among the younger recruits.  They may have been in for a while--and that was very important in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  Former communists or people who were sympathetic with the communists beginning to catch a real sense that there was a better way of improving the lives of their people and that the way they have been pursuing was in fact destructive.

The light went on for people at different points in their lives, but they're autobiographical points.  I think Richard Perle once mentioned to me way back when in the arms negotiations times with the Soviet Union that our problem was in part a political problem, that is, you really had to change the minds of 20,000 people, some number like that, at the top, and when a sufficient density of that number changes their minds, the Soviet Union was going to be in a very different position.  It was a very heavily led society.

The ambassador from Pakistan that I mentioned today from the piece in the "Washington Times" makes the comment that a significant number of the younger Taliban have been dropping out of the movement as they see the possibilities for their own country and like better the new possibility for their country than what they had been willing to die for just a short while ago.

On China, too, the most underreported fact of our time I think is that China and India in the last 20 years, 1980 to 2000, have freed some half-billion people from poverty.  It's the fact move out of poverty, greater numbers, than ever before in history.  It's a stunning, stunning achievement in changing their approach to the economic system.

The Chinese leaders in particular are making the bet that they can allow capitalist liberties to a rather remarkable extent without having a democratic society, that they can maintain Communist Party control.

I believe they are going to lose that bet from an internal dynamic of capitalism, namely, that as you get more and more successful, small entrepreneurs all over the countryside, they're going to recognize by experience that they are smarter than the commissars, they are smarter than the cadres, and they're going to more and more demand republican government, that is, some representative government.

So I believe looking further down in the future our great problem is China.  I think you're quite right to say that.  But for various reasons, I think ideas of liberty are going to be easier to spread in China and they're beginning on the economic level and spreading very, very fast.

The Chinese wherever they go abroad succeed.  If the opening is on the cultural front, they become the cultural leaders.  If the opening is in banking or enterprise, they succeed in that.  If the opening is in politics, they succeed in that.  They're an amazingly adaptable, practical people and, therefore, I expect that the Chinese authorities are going to lose their bet over the next 20 years in their ability to control the dynamism they've helped to unleash.

MR. LEDEEN:  Some day they may even get a good soccer team.  Thank you all very much for attending.  It's been an extremely enlightening session.  I hope to see you next time.