Sunday, NPR awakened me with this wonderful news: Saddam Captured While Hiding in Hole Near Hometown. And I immediately thought, another monster finally came down. Let’s be joyful and proud of America’s good work.

On the Wall Street Journal’s web site Peggy Noonan wrote: “He can’t kill anybody now. He cannot gas women and children with chemicals that kill them; he cannot personally torture dissidents, or imprison them. He cannot tell his soldiers to throw opponents off the tops of buildings. He can’t impose his sickness and sadism on the world.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., exclaimed: “Praise the Lord.... This is a day of glory for the American military, American intelligence; and it’s a day of triumph and joy for anybody in the world who cares about freedom and human rights and peace.”

After we celebrate and praise our military and intelligence forces, let’s put our hopes and expectations in their proper boxes. A failure to do so will yield frustration, especially when the stakes are so high and the game so long.

Sorting fervent hopes from prudent expectations requires understanding fundamental, immutable truths of cultures and political economy. Despite competent, well-intended folks in charge, I fear we will mess up rather badly. Here’s why.

First, we are dealing with people who believe they have a monopoly on divine truth and a duty to use violence to achieve religious goals. For many Muslims, even the well-educated, religious truth and political power are inseparable. They are mutually reinforcing: their “truth” justifies grabbing power while power sustains their sanctified way.

A short book by Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, offers a useful primer on this most alien conjunction. Investigative reporter K.R. Timmerman’s Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America illustrates the intellectual depravity of fundamentalist Islamic clerics and leaders.

While I am a classical liberal, or libertarian, at the corpuscular level, in principle I have nothing against “chosen people.” I can think of no empirical test of their claims and have lived quite productively with and written about two such groups, the Hutterian Brethren in the Northern Plains and the Mormons in Utah. Both enrich our culture and economy. Neither imposes its religion by force. We’re fortunate to have them. In contrast, the “chosen” we’re dealing with in Iraq and throughout the Middle East are most pernicious.

Second, our professional diplomats are conservative in the worst way: they seem determined to maintain the stability of the inherently unstable. Should these efforts be attainable and in our national interest, they might be defensible. They are neither.

It’s no accident there are nearly ten times as many independent countries today as in 1900. The consistent use of politics to plunder others explains high demand for more localized rule. While many academics reject this reality, even peasants know that when governments allocate wealth and opportunities, kith and kin are rewarded.

Culturally and religiously dappled societies work only when government operates in accord with the rule of law, property rights prevail, and decisions are somewhat democratic. Switzerland exemplifies these values. There are no such conditions in Iraq or, aside from Israel, nowhere else in the Middle East.

I fear we will squander America’s blood and dollars. For those whose home is Iraq, I expect worse results. Partition or extinction will ultimately occur, for the logic is compelling and forces relentless.

Here’s Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in the November 25 NYT: “President Bush’s new strategy of transferring power quickly to Iraqis, and his critics’ alternatives, share a fundamental flaw: all commit the United States to a unified Iraq, artificially and fatefully made whole from three distinct ethnic and sectarian communities. That has been possible in the past only by the application of overwhelming and brutal force.... The only viable strategy, then, may be to correct the historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shi’ites in the south.”

When this all began I asserted that we would easily win the war but I was pessimistic regarding the peace. Until diplomats recognize the benefits of separations, I see little reason to change my mind.