Washington ? Military rulers and hereditary potentates are costly luxuries for developing countries in the dawn of the 21st century. In history’s unclosing and unforgiving eye, the autocrats are forgotten but not gone.

The despotic generals, emirs and charismatic demagogues (whose hidden post-colonial agenda was “one man, one vote, one time”) deliberately dam the currents of feedback and innovation that underpin material success and personal freedom in modern society. Fostered by Washington during the Cold War, dictatorships and their recognizable cousins are ” with important exceptions ” viewed as plague-infected albatrosses in the global era.

Even the conservative Republican administration of George W. Bush sees things this way. This wartime president confronts an international landscape littered with militarized or dynastic regimes that do not work ” especially in the political and geographic space inhabited by the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. The pressures spinning out of the terror attacks on America and U.S. retaliation against radical Islamicists have reduced many of these regimes to neurotic shambles.

There may be an exception, and it lies in Turkey, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last week. “Modern Turkey demonstrates that a democratic system is indeed compatible with Islam. … There can be a separation of religion from the state that is completely compatible with personal piety.”

Like most big ideas, these sound deceptively simple. They also sound awfully convenient for an administration desperate to show it is not at war with Islam and to gain access to Turkish bases if war with Iraq comes. But Wolfowitz, the administration’s top idea man on political transformation in the Islamic world, touched important truths in a thoughtful speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Wolfowitz’s mission was to emphasize the positive (if embryonic) trends that recent democratic elections reflect in Turkey, which has kept religion out of politics since Kemal Ataturk saved the country from dismemberment following World War I. Let me be less diplomatic than the deputy secretary on two broad points:

The generals who followed Ataturk also largely kept politics out of politics during most of the past century. They co-opted and manipulated the country’s politicians, giving rise to a string of civilian governments so corrupt and incompetent that the population welcomed the military stepping in periodically to save the country all over again.

The centrist Islamic-tinged Justice and Development Party won November’s parliamentary elections because, Wolfowitz said, “Turks cast their votes for the concept of responsible and accountable representation.” They sought honesty in government, not “to politicize religion.” The new ruling party’s “belief in a Turkish destiny in Europe” could lead to its evolution into a variant of Italy’s or Germany’s Christian Democratic parties.

There are in fact grounds for such optimism. The strong pull of possible membership in the European Union has helped create a new willingness by Turkey’s generals to accept sweeping constitutional reforms and to respect the verdict of the electorate. These changes will free the country’s Kurdish minority from the worst features of an apartheid system that has oppressed them and advance civil liberties to all Turks. The military seems to have understood that it is hopeless at managing a modern market economy based on individual freedoms.

But not even Wolfowitz would say that the deal is done. That unfortunately is point two: Political evolution has had mixed success in the Islamic world and particularly in the Arab Muslim countries, where militarized regimes in various forms still hold power.

Islamic culture invites submission or revolt and largely ignores the political space between those two alternatives. Submission is best obtained by army and police rule. The system of choice inherent in democracy is anathema to fundamentalist Islam, which has increasingly turned to revolt against the secularized local regimes and the West.

This is the problem with the thesis Wolfowitz subtly argues in his London speech: He holds out the prospect that a reformed and moderate branch of Islam will emerge as a branch of a universal value system built on democracy. There can be no clash of civilizations if values are universal.

Wolfowitz is right to hope for this outcome, to push it with his ideas and to encourage the Turks to persevere in their uncommon progress. But the failing authoritarian regimes in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere show no interest in adapting to the deep historical tremors that have moved Turkey. And Washington – obsessed by the help such regimes can bring in this week’s operations against global terror – wills itself to pretend that such blindness and inflexibility does not pave the way to chaos.

– Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.