Bush spoke in Philadelphia today about Iraq. During his speech at the World Affairs Council, the president pointed out that transitions to democracy never come without paying a price. He said:

"A few blocks from here stands Independence Hall, where our Declaration of Independence was signed and our Constitution was debated.

From the perspective of more than two centuries the success of America’s democratic experiment seems almost inevitable. At the time, however, that success didn’t seem so obvious or assured.

The eight years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the election of a constitutional government were a time of disorder and upheaval.

There were uprisings, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings. There was a planned military coup that was defused only by the personal intervention of George Washington.
In 1783, Congress was chased from this city by angry veterans demanding back pay, and they stayed on the run for six months.

There were tensions between the mercantile North and the agricultural South that threatened to break apart our young republic.

And there were British loyalists who were opposed to independence and had to be reconciled with America’s new democracy.

Our founders faced many difficult challenges, they made mistakes, they learned from their experiences and they adjusted their approach.

Our nation’s first effort at a governing charter, the Articles of Confederation, failed. It took years of debate and compromise before we ratified our Constitution and inaugurated our first president.

It took a four-year civil war and a century of struggle after that before the promise of our Declaration was extended to all Americans.

It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq.

No nation in history has made the transition to a free society without facing challenges, setbacks and false starts.

The past 2½ years have been a period of difficult struggle in Iraq, yet they have also been a time of great hope and achievement for the Iraqi people.

Just over 2½ years ago, Iraq was in the grip of a cruel dictator who had invaded his neighbors, sponsored terrorists, pursued and used weapons of mass destruction, murdered his own people and, for more than a decade, defied the demands of the United Nations and the civilized world.

Since then, the Iraqi people have assumed sovereignty over their country, held free elections, drafted a democratic constitution and approved that constitution in a nationwide referendum.

Three days from now they go to the polls for the third time this year and choose a new government under the new constitution.

It’s a remarkable transformation for a country that has virtually no experience with democracy and which is struggling to overcome the legacy of one of the worst tyrannies the world has known.

And Iraqis achieved all this while determined enemies used violence and destruction to stop the progress.

There’s still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq. But thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom."

When answering questions by reporters afterward, the president said that he rejects the notion that democracy is only appropriate for certain types of people. He believes that the desire for freedom is universal.

According to a new ABC News poll, 70% of Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead.