Democracy or Stability?

At a speech in Egypt, Rice famously said, "For 60 years, my country, the United states, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region ... and we achieved neither." Unfortunately, the epitaph for her work in this Administration will be a perverse twist on that logic: since 9/11, our country has pursued democracy at the expense of stability--and we lost both.
STEPHEN E. PHILLIPS
New York City

--A letter to Time Magazine