the krauthammer says this today:

We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there.

this makes what has turned out to be a fundamental neocon error: identifying "democratic" and "pro-western." one place that this obviously breaks down is venezuela, where chavez will win an election - an election that will be pretty "free and fair" on sunday, by a landslide. the bush administration is just flummoxed by his popularity, and keeps referring to him as "totalitarian" or "anti-democratic," to the point of using that, implicitly, as an excuse to sponsor a coup; their rhetoric just leaves reality completely. but if chavez has problems, they're surely not that he won't be elected. and any inroads he's made on freedom are less dramatic than those of the bush administration itself, which has also certainly put the lie to the idea that democratic countries are peaceful countries etc etc.
but there is a refreshingly honest moment in the column, as well, when he admits the obvious:

If we really had been in the grip of "idealism," we'd be deep in Chad and Burma and Darfur.