As the American military extends its stay in postwar Iraq, the risks of political and social friction will rise. Inevitably, there will be clashes; protests erupted in May, for example, when soldiers searching for troublemakers in one town intruded on unveiled women. To keep the occupation of Iraq from ending in bitterness, American officials will have to reach out to residents both economically and politically.

To that end, they might want to consider the long-term occupation of another place where Americans haven't been universally welcomed: Okinawa. This island witnessed the bloodiest battle of World War II, losing a third of its population. The American military administered the island until 1972, when it reverted to Japanese rule. Today, 24,000 American troops are stationed there, and the military occupies one-fifth of the land.

There is a tradition of antimilitarism on the island, fed in part by the horrors of the Battle of Okinawa, and there is an active movement to evict the American troops. Yet most islanders get along well with the service members, and anti-American violence is rare. Three important lessons can be drawn from Okinawa for the American presence in postwar Iraq.

First and most obvious, commanders must do everything possible to stop criminal or just plain disorderly conduct by American personnel. Military officials on Okinawa realized the importance of this when protests arose in 1995 after three servicemen raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. The officials responded by establishing intensive educational campaigns that instilled the importance of good community relations in service members and their families. Personnel are now checked for drunkenness as they enter and leave the bases, and unarmed patrols in areas where G.I.'s socialize discourage bad behavior.

These measures appear to be helping: the military says American personnel and their families commit 1 percent of the crimes on the island, even though they are 4 percent of the population. And while protests against the bases continue, tensions have eased considerably since 1995.

While it's vital to discourage crime, it's also important to be seen as an actively beneficial presence. The second lesson of Okinawa is that the United States should try to contribute to the local economy, and to spread its largess.

American bases in Okinawa provide thousands of jobs to locals. The Americans are consumers too, keeping small businesses afloat. The islanders who lease the land for the bases collect above-market rents, and local governments get public works money from Tokyo as a side payment for bearing the "basing burden." That means a critical mass of Okinawans is reluctant to see the American bases disappear. To build goodwill in Iraq, officials should ensure that many different local interests profit from the American presence.

The third lesson is that American officials should establish strong lines of communication with the local authorities, not just with national officials - especially if, as on Okinawa, they represent a distinct ethnic group. To give islanders more of a voice, there is a tripartite committee for Okinawan, American and Japanese officials to discuss base-related matters. In Iraq, community representatives must likewise be included in base negotiations, especially in the Kurdish north and Shiite south.

As part of these efforts, a vigorous volunteer program like the one on Okinawa - involving everything from teaching in local schools to assisting the disabled - can help convince residents that American troops are on their side. Rebuilding security will be the greatest long-term challenge in postwar Iraq. Learning from the United States experience on Okinawa can help ensure the success of the Iraqi occupation, enabling the troops to come home all the more quickly.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

Since the rise to power in Russia of this obscure bureaucrat and former KGB agent in the fall of 1999, two groups in the West have answered this question very differently.

For some bankers, investors and diplomats, Russian President Vladimir Putin was a godsend. On his watch, Russia's 1998 devaluation and rising oil prices began to fuel economic growth for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If not personally responsible for the turnaround, Mr. Putin did initiate reforms designed to sustain it over the long haul. He replaced the personal income tax with a 13% flat tax, cut corporate taxes, balanced the budget, paid foreign debts, legalized land ownership, supported the restructuring of the big monopolies, and even began to tackle sensitive social services reforms. Compared with the last years of Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin looked like a dedicated proponent of capitalism.

In parallel to this storyline of Vladimir Putin as hero, a more sinister subplot emerged. As liberal tax reforms sailed through the Russian parliament, Mr. Putin's team was implementing illiberal political changes. During the Putin era, all national television networks effectively came back under the state control. The closing of TVS last month was the final blow. Russian soldiers have continued to abuse the human rights of Russian citizens living in Chechnya. (To be sure, Chechen fighters have practiced similar inhumane tactics, but two wrongs don't make a right.) Human rights organizations have been harassed, journalists imprisoned, and Western aid workers thrown out of the country. Of course, Mr. Putin personally rarely intervened in these rollbacks of democracy. But that's the point: he did nothing to stop these obvious steps toward authoritarian rule.

These two Vladimir Putins -- economic reformer and democratic backslider -- have lived side-by-side without meeting. Business people brushed aside the crackdown on the media as a necessary response to the anarchy unleashed during the Yeltsin era. The apologists claim Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, the two media magnates who were forced to flee the country to avoid jail, got what they deserved: Mr. Putin wasn't suppressing freedom of the press, only limiting the power of corrupt oligarchs. Some bold voices in the business community even championed interim dictatorship in Russia as the only way to provide the stability for investment and economic growth.

For their part, critics of Mr. Putin's anti-democratic policies undermined the punch of their analysis by exaggerating the Russian president's ruthlessness and failing to recognize his accomplishments in other sphere. They cast Mr. Putin as a new dictator who has more in common with Stalin than Boris Yeltsin or Mikhail Gorbachev.

Last week, the arrest of billionaire Platon Lebedev brought the two Vladimir Putins together. Mr. Lebedev runs Menatep, the bank for the Yukos financial-industrial group headed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man. Like Mr. Lebedev and others in the Yukos-Menatep organization, he made his fortune by using personal relationships with government bureaucrats to acquire state assets -- in this case, oil and mineral companies -- for a song.

When Mr. Putin first came to power, many billionaires worried the new Russian president would redistribute property rights once again, this time to a new set of cronies. Instead, Mr. Putin implicitly offered the oligarchs a deal: you keep what you had before as long you run your companies without looking for government handouts and get out of politics.

Unlike Vladimir Gusinsky or Boris Berezovsky, Mr. Khodorkovsky eagerly accepted this bargain. He and his team kept out of jail and built Yukos into one of Russia's most profitable, most transparent, and most Westernized companies. He grew to be first among equals among Russia's other oligarchs. He also began to operate differently than the rest, establishing his own foundations, charitable causes, and think tanks. In this election year, he also openly donated money to two of Russia's largest political parties, Yabloko and the Communists. Mr. Khodorkovsky calculated that all this fell within the bounds of the implicit pact between the Putin administration and the oligarchs.

Last week's arrest, and the police questioning of Mr. Khodorkovsky, suggest that the Russian president interprets the pact differently. Mr. Khodorkovsky's economic power and political ambitions threatened Mr. Putin. So the president changed the rules of the game. Economic deals of the past once thought to be beyond scrutiny are now suddenly in question. If there are now new rules, then the alleged claim against Mr. Lebedev -- that he illegally acquired assets in the 1994 privatization of the Apatit fertilizer company -- or similar ones, could be leveled against nearly every businessman who operated in Russia since the early 1990s.

If these new informal rules are being remade to scare Mr. Khodorkovsky away from politics, then the arrest of Platon Lebedev is even more sobering. It means that Russians are not allowed to try to influence electoral outcomes -- an essential feature of even the most minimal democracy. Of course, oil tycoons should not be allowed to deploy their financial resources to skew the electoral playing field. But the enforcement of campaign finance laws is the tool that most democracies use to address this problem, not random arrest.

Arbitrary rule by the state is not only undemocratic. It's bad for business. A state that isn't constrained by checks and balances, the rule of law, the scrutiny of an independent media, or the will of the voters is unpredictable at best, predatory at worst. Two weeks ago, Mr. Lebedev probably would have argued that President Putin's economic accomplishments outweighed its democratic failures. Today, he probably has a different view. So should the rest of us.

George W. Bush wants Americans and the world to believe that the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime two months ago represented a defeat for tyranny and a victory for liberty. No one has devoted more words to framing regime change in Iraq in these terms than the president.

In the debate leading up to the war, Mr. Bush and his administration focused primarily on Iraq's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and the threat they posed to the US to justify military action. After military victory, however, Bush has emphasized the larger objective of promoting liberty in Iraq and the greater Middle East, especially because the search for weapons of mass destruction has produced such limited results. This mission statement for Iraq echoes convictions Bush stressed in every major foreign policy speech given since Sept. 11.

The president, however, has one big problem in pursuing this foreign-policy agenda. Few believe he is serious. Around the world, many see an imperial power using its military might to secure oil and replace anti-American dictators with pro-American dictators.

At home, isolationists in both the Republican and Democratic parties shudder at the folly of another Wilsonian mission to make the world safe for democracy.

Both at home and abroad, observers of Bush's foreign policy are confused by the mixed messages it sends. Was the war against Iraq undertaken to eliminate weapons of mass destruction or to spread liberty?

Bush faces an even more daunting challenge in making his commitment to democracy-promotion credible - the perception of hypocrisy. Bush has shown more concern for bringing freedom to Afghanistan and Iraq than to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

If Bush is truly committed to a foreign-policy doctrine of liberty-promotion, none of these criticisms is insurmountable. But they must be addressed. Especially now, with end of war in Iraq, what Bush says and does will define the true contours of his foreign-policy doctrine. Is it a liberty doctrine? Or does the language of liberty camouflage ulterior motives?

We will know that Bush is serious about promoting liberty if he credibly commits to four important tasks.

First, and most obviously, he must devote intellectual energy and financial resources to securing new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that, if not full-blown democracies, at least show the potential for democratization over time. To date, the record of achievement in both places is spotty. Bush has to keep these two countries at the top of his agenda, making regime construction as important as regime destruction. If democratizing regimes do not take hold in these countries, then Bush has no credibility in promoting liberty elsewhere.

Second, if Bush is serious about his stated mission, then he must give more attention to developing, funding, and legitimating the nonmilitary tools for promoting political liberalization abroad. The Marines cannot be used to promote democratic regime change in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Uzbekistan. Wilson had his 14 points and Truman his Marshall Plan. Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. Reagan started the hugely successful National Endowment for Democracy. Bush needs to lend his name to similar grand initiatives.

Third, in future speeches, Bush must flesh out the next phase of his liberty doctrine by explaining his priorities. Even the most powerful country in the world cannot bring liberty to every person living under tyranny all at once. But the president does owe the American people and the world a clearer game plan. It is no accident that Bush has given top priority to promoting democratic regime change in places where autocratic regimes were also enemies of the US. Fine, but what principles guide the next moves? There are also countries in which the promotion of political liberalization at this time could actually lead to less freedom, not more. What are the criteria being used to identify such places? To win supporters to his mission, Bush must present a rationale for the next phase of democracy promotion.

Fourth, even if the US does not have the capacity to promote freedom everywhere all the time, the president can make his commitment to liberty more credible if he develops a consistent message about his foreign-policy objectives, no matter what the setting. Words matter. Advocates of democracy living under dictatorship can be inspired by words of support from an American president. They can also become frustrated and despondent when the American president refrains from echoing his liberty doctrine when visiting their country. For instance, Bush's failure to speak openly about democratic erosion on his recent visit to Russia was a big disappointment to Russian democrats.

Some will always believe that the US is just another imperial power, not unlike the old Soviet Union, Britain, France, or Rome, exploiting military power for material gains. But for others of us who want to believe that the US has a nobler mission in the world, we are waiting on the president to give us signs of a long-term credible commitment to promoting liberty abroad.