Later, Woolsey said he shared some of Wicker's worries. "I'm nervous about announcing timetables for drawdown," he said. His solution to the problems now facing Iraq is to revive Iraq's constitutional monarchy and install a member of the Hashemite royal family as the country's king. This, of course, is what the British did in Iraq after World War I. Democracy in the Middle East didn't ensue.

Wicker was followed by the lanky, bearded Pipes, the most impolitic speaker of all. Dressed in a black oxford shirt, with dour eyes and a frown, Pipes dismissed much of what the White House has said about rationale for the war and the occupation. "However popular the uprooting of Saddam Hussein, they do not want us there," said Pipes.

Before the war, Pipes was a proponent of the democracy domino theory. In February, he published a column titled "Why Stop in Iraq: Here's a Chance to Reform the Entire Arab World." In it, he argued with those who suggested that democracy wouldn't work in Iraq, saying, "Japan had about as much affinity for democracy in 1945 as the Arabs do today, yet democracy took hold there ... A US victory in Iraq and the successful rehabilitation of that country will bring liberals out of the woodwork and generally move the region towards democracy."

Now, though, he's contemptuous of the idealistic case for war, the case that wooed some liberals to Bush's side in the first place. "We have no, no moral responsibility to the Iraqi people," he said. "Our moral responsibility is to ourselves. I very much disagree with the name 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' It should have been 'Operation American Security.'" This met with applause.

"Our goal is not a free Iraq," Pipes continued. "Our goal is an Iraq that does not endanger us." What we need, he says, is a "democratic-minded strongman."

This is exactly the kind of betrayal the war's opponents expected all along. And that's what I spoke about when, on Sunday morning, after a delicious breakfast of fresh raspberries and cranberry bread, I took the stage.

With me on the panel was pugilistic Democratic pollster and strategist Pat Caddell, the only other liberal at Restoration Weekend. Caddell, who'd spent most of the conference sick in his room, has played the native-informant role against Bill Clinton, whom he loathed as intensely as Christopher Hitchens did. Now, though, he had his sights on Bush, and he banged his fist on the table shouting that the war in Iraq had been a "bait-and-switch operation."

Also there was Greg Yardley, an affable young man who has veered from the campus cult of the hard left to the Horowitz cult of the ex-communist right. Like a recovering alcoholic at an AA meeting, he offered his time on the dark side as a cautionary tale before telling the audience about the unsavory communist groups behind the antiwar organizations ANSWER and Not In Our Name. The audience, which appeared to number about 50, included Woolsey and Katherine Harris. Several people took notes as Yardley gave a precise, accurate account of the communist groups' veneration for tyrannies in North Korea and China, their attempts to whitewash the genocides of Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, and their canny domination of the peace movement.

I was glad Yardley laid out the problems with ANSWER and Not In Our Name so well, because it meant I didn't have to. Instead, I devoted my 10 minutes at the podium to an effort to help some in the audience see the real reasons why millions took to the streets to protest the war.

I'm quoting now from the speech I wrote, which may not actually be the speech I gave, since I improvised as I spoke. There's something strangely exhilarating about standing before your opponents and, after two days of keeping your mouth shut, telling them what you think, though perhaps I could have been more eloquent if I had been less angry.

"Few liberals doubted the righteousness of ridding the world of Saddam," I said. "They doubted the competence of the Bush administration not to make a mess of things. Can you really look at what's happening in Iraq and say they were wrong?"

This, of course, was an obvious mistake, since much of the crowd shouted, "Yes!"

A little thrown, I continued, saying that many liberals would have supported a multilateral war waged on humanitarian grounds. They protested, though, because they "believed that the administration's case for war was dishonest and its plan for occupation dangerous, and I suspect some of you know in your hearts that they were right."

"Groups like ANSWER let you dismiss Bush's opponents as loony nihilists," I said, "but I met many people at antiwar demonstrations who have as much claim to American-ness as anyone at this conference, and they're afraid of where you want to lead this country."

I ended by saying that, because Bush ignored the country's uneasiness about the war, there was now diminishing support for the deteriorating occupation, creating the danger that America will simply give up on Iraq. "If the American people, feeling betrayed, force their country to betray the Iraqis, this war will have won us nothing at all," I said, a line that, surprisingly, was applauded by some of the audience, people who perhaps really believed that this was a war for democracy.

There were questions afterward, and Pat Caddell and I spent the next 45 minutes in an increasingly heated debate with the entire room. As people left, though, I was somewhat stunned to be approached by Katherine Harris, who was gracious in complimenting me and saying she agreed that we must not betray the Iraqis again.

What, then, did she think of the news that Bush planned to end the official occupation next spring? She said it all happened while she was gone and no one had told her. She seemed to want to distance herself from it.

Perhaps she was one of the few who'd actually believed in the glorious promise of democratizing Iraq. Perhaps, Caddell suggested later over lunch, Bush had even believed it himself.

If so, the Iraqis aren't the only people betrayed by those who planned this war.

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