After two years of relentless bad news for Western interventionism in the Middle East, the response to recent events in Beirut has been understandable: near hysterical optimism. Commentators have collated elections in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine with reports hinting at liberalisation in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Given a government toppled by street protests in Beirut and it is easy to declare "mission accomplished". I have even seen maps showing Iraq painted bright red for "democratic".

Amid such propaganda and wishful thinking, coherent sober analysis is not easy. Similar much-trumpeted dawns in the region's past - in Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan - have proved utterly false. Any sensible person must welcome any step towards popular pluralism in an area where repression has been the default mode of government. Democracy remains a laudable goal. Were it indeed the case that its sun is finally rising over the muslim world, all should cheer.

But tossing a miasma of events into a journalistic cocktail seldom yields clarity. The news from Beirut had nothing to do with Iraq and precious little with democracy. It was an eruption of traumatic fury at the murder of an opposition leader, Rafiq Hariri, allegedly by the Syrian occupiers of Lebanon. Long humiliated by the Syrian presence, Beirut took to the streets and secured the resignation of the pro-Syrian government. When a year ago Iraq's Sunnis had the temerity to treat an occupying regime likewise in Fallujah, the Americans called them insurgents and bombed them.

Syria has reacted wisely by withdrawing its troops to the Beka'a Valley, pending evidence that Lebanon's assembly can form a stable government. The Syrian Ba'athist leader, Bashar Assad, pointed out not unreasonably that Syria's 15-year occupation has achieved what years of civil war, Western meddling and 150,000 deaths had failed to achieve, peace, prosperity and even a limited modicum of democracy. This is how America justifed its occupation of Iraq, with conspicuously less success.

Lebanon has a terrible record of self-government and civil strife. It was more than ironic to hear the ageing Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, being quoted last week as referring to the Iraq election as "the fall of the Berlin wall". We must hope he can help run Lebanon better than he did a generation ago. There is no knowing how Lebanon's Shia Hezbollah movement can be converted into a force for peace and reconciliation, at home and abroad. This is crucial to any hope that Palestine's new, moderate leadership may deliver an end to suicide terrorism in Israel. All that can be said now is that Syria's caution is understandable while the Levant holds its breath.

Elsewhere the thesis that the wind is changing is implausible. Afghanistan may be enjoying greater freedom, at least in its capital, than under the Taleban. But warlordism based on an economy dependant on opium is hardly a democracy, nor was what amounted to a one-party election last year. Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are dictatorships openly favoured by the West. Iran is a primitive hierocracy, whose handling by America seems intended to drive it more towards North Korea than to John Stuart Mill. This hugely important state is in the grip of conservatives who gorge themselves on ever more hysterical anti-Americanism.

The 1990 Gulf War yielded exactly the same hysteria over democracy in the Middle East. It did not even yield it among the Gulf states. Kuwait is not a democracy. Bahrain's autocratic sheikh is feted as a good friend of America. As for any idea that the rulers in Riyadh or Cairo have the slightest intention of permitting open opposition to their regimes, that is pie in the sky.

Then there is Iraq. Until 2003 it was a vicious but stable dictatorship under a ruler who would not still be in power but for past Western backing. It is now ranked the world's most dangerous state. No one can get from its airport to its capital except in a full military convoy. It harbours the most murderous terrorist cells in the world. This week the United Nations formally logged a charge of repression against the Baghdad government, including press censorship, detention without trial and torture.

Iraq can at last wave an election from its bunker. But the Kurds were voting for Kurdistan and the Shias because the mullahs ordered it. The Sunnis boycotted. America backed more plausible elections in Vietnam and Lebanon before disaster ensued. This remains a wholly "failed state". Political freedom without security is meaningless, as Tony Blair keeps telling the British people.

The most sensible remark I heard at the weekend was from a Lebanese observer on Radio 4. She said that the American invasion of Iraq had plunged her region into turmoil from which, indeed, there were some signs of recovery. Such signs, such as in Palestine and Lebanon, were from the bottom up, the result of a change in local circumstances. Attributing them to "American pressure" would be counterproductive. The West keep out, she pleaded.

Iraq must one day sort out its own fate, either in civil war or more probably in partition. The West would help best by withdrawing its backing from the region's dictators, oil-rich sheikhs and, for that matter, the more extreme elements in Israeli politics. It should leave local popular pressure to do its business its own way, and in its own time. Let Middle Easterners resolve their balance of power their own way, because that way is likely to prove more lasting.

Were that to happen, it would be a true cause for optimism.

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