Saskia Sassen objects to seeing Bush as a legitimate descendant of Wilson by remarking on the vastly different circumstances of the two presidencies, and I agree. But I do think Wilson "intuited" democratic peace theory and this perhaps as early as 1901 and certainly when he was thinking of the Pan American Union and the Covenant of the League between 1915 and 1919. Wilson thought regime type mattered enormously--thus he insisted on the Kaiser's abdication in 1918, and had a "non-recognition doctrine" of Latin American governments that came to power by military means.. Now obviously Wilson was not as sophisticated in his argument as, say, Bruce Russett is, but his intuitive sense was clearly in exactly the sense that the democratic peace crowd moved in the 1990s.

As for doing in democratizing regimes in Guatemala, Iran, and the Dominican Republic, the Wilsonian argument, and probably that of democratic peace theory, is that they were immature, unstable, and getting support from local communist movements. Hence they could not be trusted in dangerous times. I agree with Sassen's implicit criticism of American imperialism, but I think it can nonetheless be squared with liberal internationalist thought even if it requires some stretching.

While I certainly agree with Charles Kupchan that a heavy dose of realism needs to be downed by anyone with Wilsonian ambitions, I'm less sure about 9/11 having been indispensable for the invasion of Iraq to have occurred. If anyone reading this is still here when the Bush archives are finally opened in 2053 (or could there be an earlier date with Freedom of Information), I suspect you will find lots of activity in high neoconservative circles to take out Saddam well before 9/11. Could it be they would have suggested a Bay of Pigs type scenario as Wolfowitz did in Senate testimony in 1998, but a Bay of Pigs that succeeded the second time around? Liberals, too, were on a roll after the relatively easy dispatch of Milosevic in 1999. There was a mood afoot in the land to be tough after the 2000 election, and while Kupchan may be correct it would never have led to a full scale invasion of Iraq, who knows what other scenarios were being devised....