The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

Yes, democracy remains the best system yet devised for the ordering of human society. But even the strongest democracy can be subverted by leaders bent on deception and aggression. Even the strongest democracy can give rise to a ruthless, corporate-driven war machine, to secret prisons, secret armies, torture regimens and mass slaughter. Democracy, for all its virtues, is not proof against systematic moral corruption -- or monstrous atrocity. The ashes of Auschwitz are still falling on the innocents being murdered today.