The message appears, so far, to have found little resonance in Washington as President Bush sets out, after the shock of the midterm elections, to review American policy on Iraq. The closest anyone with the White House’s ear has come to suggesting anything short of democratic rule, let alone an authoritarian model typical of other countries in the Middle East, are leaks from the bipartisan commission headed by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, which is charged with suggesting a new American approach to Iraq; some of its members have said that the group has considered recommending that stability, rather than democracy, should become the principal objective there.

For the Bush administration, which made democracy-building here a cornerstone of everything it did after the American-led invasion, abandoning that goal now would be tantamount to abandoning one of its core missions. Coming on top of the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the original justification for going to war with Mr. Hussein, it would constitute an about-face of historic proportions. But many Iraqis believe that it may now be the only hope — and a slim one, at that — of halting their country’s descent into catastrophe.

Of the many hard lessons America may take from its enterprise here, the impracticality of grafting American political values onto a society as different as Iraq’s, by measure of culture, religion and historical experience, will surely be one. History may judge that attempting it in the midst of a savage war was the greatest of follies. Far from Iraq becoming a beacon of democracy for the Middle East, some Arab scholars have said, the violence in Iraq will embolden other Arab leaders who defend their authoritarianism as a bulwark against chaos.

Lately, President Bush has put less emphasis on building democracy in his evolving definition of the American objective in Iraq. “A government that can defend, govern and sustain itself” was the way he put it at his news conference on Wednesday, a formulation that suggests that he, too, may have reduced the focus on the Jeffersonian ideals prevalent in the headier days after the American-led invasion. Then, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the American occupation authority, set aside $750 million for what was called “democracy building,” sometimes with results that bordered on the comical.

One example was a democracy center in the southern city of Hilla, led by a man Mr. Bremer described as one of the most remarkable Iraqis he had met, Sayyid Farquat al-Qizwini. Mr. Qizwini, a towering figure with a bird’s-nest beard and a black turban signifying his descent from the Prophet Mohammed, moved onto the American payroll after he “liberated” a mosque Saddam Hussein had built and named for himself, and used it for democracy classes for Shiite imams and tribal leaders. Away from the Americans, Mr. Qizwini liked to make a joke of the enterprise, saying he had once had to sing the praises of Mr. Hussein and, for $100 a day, was happy to do the same for the Americans.