PERHAPS THE PURPLE FINGERS HELPED.  Reason's Jacob Sullum takes stock of the neocons' democratization efforts.

As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets of Cairo, braving riot police, tanks, and the government's plainclothes thugs in an ultimately successful effort to end Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship, Elliott Abrams realized something important: George W. Bush was right.

Writing in The Washington Post, Abrams, a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, credited his former boss with recognizing that "Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections." Other Bush partisans echoed Abrams, praising the former president for insisting, as he put it in a 2003 speech, that "every person has the ability and the right to be free."

The truth may be more elusive. Mr Sullum's concluding remarks note the tragic tradeoff inherent in any great power protecting its permanent interests.

Mindful of democratic elections that have empowered illiberal forces such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Obama, like Bush before him, worries that friendly autocrats will be replaced by hostile populists. Let's hope this fear, which underlies the long history of desperate despot coddling that Bush continued while condemning, does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At the same time that defenders of the nation building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are claiming some credit; critics of those efforts are suggesting that the nonexistence of strong pro-U.S. governments in those countries emboldens opponents of the relatively sympathetic strongmen in Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain. Iran and Libya are hardly home to friendly governments, and 22 years after Tiananmen Square, a new generation again questions the Chinese emperor.

A dangerous tendency has shown itself of late among many of our personnel -- an unwillingness to share the joys and hardships of the masses, a concern for personal fame and gain.

(Chairman Mao, 1957.)