'Yet by liberating themselves, the people of the Middle East will also liberate us.'

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It now turns out that those exertions were unnecessary or, at the very least, superfluous. For nine years, the U.S. has been pushing in on a door that opens outward. More amazing still, that door swings open of its own volition. Events of the last several weeks have made it abundantly clear not only that important parts of the Islamic world are ripe for change but that the impetus for change comes from within. Transformation is not something that outsiders can induce or impose or control. The process is organic, spontaneous and self-sustaining.

So poor Muslims tired of living in squalor, and the not-so-poor fed up with suffering under the boot of corrupt authoritarian regimes (not infrequently allied with the United States), don't need Washington's coaching. They don't need us to "liberate" them. They are perfectly capable of liberating themselves. And their doing so basically doesn't cost the American taxpayer a nickel.

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Intent on positioning themselves on "the right side of history," senior U. S. officials busily amend whatever pronouncements they issued a week ago, hoping no one will notice. Determined to sustain the pretense that the United States remains capable of exercising "global leadership," pundits and policy analysts discreetly tap into Al Jazeera English in hopes of figuring out what's actually going on.

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Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.

That unusual decision was in deference to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan, who did not want any official estimate of the insurgency's strength that would contradict his claims of success by Special Operations Forces in reducing the capabilities of the Taliban in 2010.

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First, when it comes to divining history's purposes and intentions, the world's only superpower is clueless. "The whole drama of history," the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, "is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management." True when he wrote it more than half a century ago, the passage remains true today, notwithstanding the wonders of computers, iPhones and social networking.

Second, to disregard Niebuhr's counsel is to incur severe penalties. Arrogance invites punishment. The punishment that the United States has sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan merits not simply remembrance but sorrowful reflection: These were needless losses. For those who once advocated preventive war as the shortest path to peace, sackcloth and ashes might be appropriate.

At the same time, however, we might take some small consolation in this: The demonstrators filling the streets in Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Manama, Sana and Tehran give every indication of dreaming dreams not entirely dissimilar from our own. Rather than rejecting modernity, as radical Islamists such as Osama bin Laden have urged, these protesters want a bigger slice of what modernity has to offer. Though not guaranteeing harmonious coexistence, this convergence of aspirations does suggest that a cosmic clash of civilizations is avoidable.

If the Muslim masses demanding political freedom and economic opportunity prevail, they will do so not thanks to but despite the United States. Yet by liberating themselves, they will also liberate us. Our misbegotten crusade to determine their destiny will finally end. In that case, we will owe them a great debt.

Washington's bipartisan consensus during and after the Cold War in favor of cultivating strong relationships with totalitarian regimes that repress their people remains the ultimate cause of anti-Americanism in many parts of the world, including the Middle East.

Tunis and Cairo are symbols of the yawning gap between the American self-image and political rhetoric of promoting democracy on one hand, and the continued preference for "big men" with whom Washington can easily "do business with" on the other.

The revolutions in the Middle East reflect the disconnection between American ideals and practice. Intelligence failure is a charade or, at best, a minor glitch compared to the larger problem of policy failure.

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