Here's the storyline: Just as Bush's neo-conservative advisers planned, ousting Saddam transformed not just Iraq but the balance of power in the Middle East. It gave ordinary Arabs and Muslims a sense of democratic possibility (how dare we smugly presume that Arabs can't do democracy?) Once Saddam went down, the other dominoes started falling.

"Across the Middle East, a critical mass of events is taking that region in a hopeful new direction," declared the President in his March 8th speech to the National Defense University. One conservative pundit after another has insisted that the "Arab Spring," as Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe dubbed it, proves that Bush and the neocons were right. Fouad Ahami declaimed in US News and World Report, "Today the Arab world is beset by a mighty storm."

"To praise Wolfowitz is not triumphalism," wrote David Brooks in a New York Times column that was predictably triumphal. "Grudging praise for the Bush policy is now popping up in strange places like the editorial page of The New York Times," crowed George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal, "or the utterances of Democratic partisans."

Well, just read the headlines: Syria, respecting America's new muscle, is thrown off balance. Lebanon, long Syria's puppet, is demanding liberty. Egypt's despotic president (and U.S. client) Hosni Mubarak, is suddenly promising multi-party elections. Saudi Arabia's local elections are more authentic than usual. On the Palestine-Israel front, there's new progress. Iran is negotiating about shutting down its nukes. And in Iraq itself, the process may be a mess but something real is happening.

Wow! If this picture is true, let's nominate George W. Bush for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The only trouble is, the picture isn't true.

For starters, each of these events has its own dynamics. The new Israel-Palestine reality reflects the death of Yassir Arafat and Ariel Sharon's decision to seize the moment, defy his party and do a "Nixon to China" by dismantling some Israeli settlements in Arab lands. This shift has nothing to do with Bush or Iraq. Indeed, the Bush administration has been less active in promoting a Palestine settlement than any in memory.

(Watch out, when Fidel Castro finally dies of old age and democracy comes to Cuba, Bush will take credit for that, too.)

Saudi Arabia remains a dictatorship (and intimate ally of the Bush administration.) The prospect of genuine democracy breaking out there soon is laughable. Egypt, a place where the CIA sends highly sensitive prisoners to be tortured, is a similar story. If Iran is negotiating about its nuclear ambitions, it is thanks to European diplomacy and over U.S. objections.

A week ago, the storyline on Lebanon was that the people were rising up and demanding that Syria exit. Now, it turns out that Hezbollah, the largest party representing Shiites, and ally of the Syrians, is dominant. And the Bush administration is reluctantly embracing the French view (!) that Hezbollah should be worked with and, one hopes, perhaps, domesticated.

Lebanon's instability dates to the 1920s, when the French split it off from Syria as a Christian enclave. The French formula gave the Lebanese Christian Maronites power over a larger Muslim majority. The consequences: on-and-off civil war and Syrian protectorate of Muslims. (See Juan Cole on this history.)

Lebanon is reminiscent of other colonial legacies in countless places like Rwanda, Vietnam, India, Iraq, where western powers played brutal ethnic games of divide and rule. The United States has tried to intervene in Lebanon before, and each time got its fingers burnt.

What the whole Mideast region has in common is a sense of bottled-up popular grievances, many of them directed against the United States for propping up dictators that served American military and corporate interests (including, once, Saddam Hussein).

So if genuine democracy breaks out, Bush might not like it. Al- Jazeera, the Arab world's mirror image of Fox news, it is the closest thing to crudely free Arab language media -- and the Bush administration keeps trying to strangle it. By the same token, the eventual government that emerges in Baghdad is not likely to be both genuinely democratic and pro-American.

Bush is right that people everywhere want to be free. But the fitful expansion of democracy has been more often the fruit of local struggle and complex diplomacy than American military intervention. That's true of South Africa, where Bush's pals viewed Nelson Mandela as an untrustworthy Marxist. It's true of several nations where local dictators were allied with U.S. military or corporate interests, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines. Ukraine, the Czech Republic and most the former Soviet empire won democracy on their own terms.

Often, astute diplomacy and civil-society initiatives work where invasions can't. The little-remembered Helsinki Process of the 1970s traded a U.S. guarantee of no western-sponsored "regime change" in the Soviet Bloc for Moscow's loosening of the screws. Civil society blossomed. American conservatives hated the deal. But before the Russians knew it, the Berlin wall came down. (See Flynt Leverett on this point in the March American Prospect.)

Bush is also right that democracy is contagious. As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker after the Iraqis managed to hold an election, "One can marvel at the power of the democratic idea…. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush."

So let's welcome Bush's improbable embrace of universal freedom. Indeed, if Bush is truly backing away from his party's tradition of imposing pro-American strongmen, that would be something indeed.

As Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting a Russian proverb, "Trust, but verify." Let's hold Bush to his fine words. Let's have no double standards for despotic allies. Let's not manipulate other people's democracy behind the scenes. And if democracy is good enough for Iraqis, let's defend what Bush has not yet wrecked of our beleaguered democracy at home.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared in the Boston Globe.