April 6, 2004 - Yesterday, in a piece reflecting on the current guerilla offensive in Iraq, I wrote, “Power may grow, as Mao said, from the barrel of a gun but democracy does not.” A reader threw the sentence back at me and advised that I should tell that to our ancestors at Lexington and Concord. Alas, I cannot. My ancestors were at neither the Village Green nor the Rude Bridge on the 18th of April in ’75 for they were not Massachusetts men.

They were Marylanders and Virginians, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians. They sat in the House of Burgesses in 1619 and took their place at the Governor’s Council in Niew Amsterdam. They were with Washington at Brooklyn Heights and on the Brandywine. . They crossed the Delaware at Christmas and marched across Illinois with Rogers Clark. They, like the men from Boston, knew that they did not shoulder their arms to establish democracy but to defended their democratic liberty and freedom in their own country from the assault upon it by their own sovereign and to drive his alien invaders from the land in which the tree of liberty had taken a firm and enduring root.

No, my friends, democracy does not grow from the barrel of a gun. It grows in the hearts of free men and women, nurtured by their yearnings and watered too often by blood shed in its defense. It grows in the soil of free and open debate fertilized by a free press to distribute its ideas in the market place of open minds. What grows from the barrel of a gun is liberty’s antithesis – power that stifles debate and uses its force to still the voices of dissent, paralyze the printing press, and impose an alien regime of puppets. It is that against which my ancestors fought and bled and died.

If you see a parallel between the invading army sent by that George and those brigades sent by this George, I did not draw it. If you see a similarity between the Lobsterbacks firing on Boston Common and our troops opening fire in the Fallujah streets two hundred thirty years later then your eyes have been opened by the facts on the ground and not by the words that I write. If you wonder that the minds of those who rise up against an alien occupation of Baghdad might be filled with the same patriotic passion that impelled the Boston men to spark the fuse of revolution then you will understand that a drive to establish democracy in Iraq cannot be sustained by machine guns and puppet regimes.

The vine of democracy can be planted in alien soil but it must be tended with an outstretched hand and not an upraised fist. Given time and care it will bear the sweetest fruit and the vintner’s wine will quench the universal thirst for freedom. But the vine cannot grow in an atmosphere where the winds blow the stink of cordite to the nostrils and death’s odor on the breeze. Its fruit will be bitter and withered and forever tainted by the flavor of war.