Returning to my reading of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies ...

One of the central questions of The Republic, as most of us know, is "Who should rule?" and Plato's well known answer is "The Philosopher King."

The Philosopher King, keep in mind, is no benevolent dictator. He will rule, according to Plato, through deceit, force and steadfast resolve to check any change or innovation in society. He will be worshiped as a demi-god and future leaders will be his duplicate. Society will be stratified in a caste system and individualism will be suppressed.

This was Plato's plan for his utopia.

Think of the overweening hubris that would lead a philosopher to nominate himself to be king of his ideal society, and according to Popper, The Philosopher King was no metaphor proposed by Plato for some future leader. Plato meant, literally, that he, Plato, should rule Athens. The Republic was as much a bit of self-promoting propaganda as it was a philosophical tract.

"Power tends to corrupt," Lord Acton wrote more than 100 years ago, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton proved himself a wiser philosopher than Plato, for Plato asked the wrong question.

If we ask "Who should rule?" we are asking for a ruler, and rulers, with rare exceptions, turn out to be tyrants.

A lot of people are asking now, "Who should rule Iraq?" The answer is, the people should rule Iraq, and the only way that happens is to make the rule of law, a constitution, institutions accountable to the people, and a court system that upholds equalitarian principles the governing force in Iraq.

Creating those implements of an open society will not be difficult. Getting the Iraqi people to trust and embrace the implements of an open society might be harder. It was easy 200 years ago because the U.S.'s revolution was an internal revolution. Our leaders had the vision, communicated the vision and the people trusted them because they participated in the revolution. The only non-Ba'thist leaders in Iraq right now are the mulhas and the ayatollahs, and clearly some of them see themselves as Philosopher Kings.

General Jay Garner has a tough task. He must move quickly to plant the seeds of self-rule, countering the propaganda of the Islamists with evidence on the ground that the Iraqi people can rule themselves and don't need tyrants doing it for them. He can best do this by helping to establish town councils and other low-level democratic institutions and representative bodies that will bring as many people in the process as quickly as possible. Iraq is months, if not years, away from national elections (if this process is going to be handled correctly), but local representative bodies can help the Iraqis start identifying its future leaders.

Somewhere within Iraq are potential Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons and Jays. Rebuilding Iraq will only be successful if this talent rises to the surface.

If we fail to turn the Iraqi people away from the question of "Who should rule us?" to "How shall we govern our country?" then the war will have been a failure in its most important aspect — turning Iraq into a beacon of freedom in the region.