If one of the social graces is knowing when to leave, Ronald Reagan was a gentleman with providential timing.

His death came at just the right moment. Not for his family, though they must feel relief that his suffering is ended, but for the nation he loved. I mean this: Americans are in the throes of an identity crisis, trying at this difficult historical juncture to figure out what kind of people they are.

Are they the sadists at Abu Ghraib? Unwelcome occupiers or liberators of Iraq? Arrogant invaders bent on confiscating precious resources, or freedom fighters trying to help others claim their birthright to liberty?

To read commentary from the far left these days - or to view the world through Michael Moore's propagandist camera lens - one is hard-pressed to find American affirmation. For the Bush-hating crowd, the leap from "we deserved it" to "Bush lied!" to "quagmire" and now to "Iraq is an unmitigated disaster" was a matter of mere baby steps.

That's how life looks if your glass is always half-empty. If your glass is half-full, as Reagan's surely was, you might see things differently.

You might see that Abu Ghraib was an awful act of embarrassing deviancy; that Iraq indeed has been liberated rather than occupied as we hand over the reins of government to the Iraqi people; that American gas prices indicate something other than an imperialist oil grab.

It is nice to be reminded of these things. Reagan's death was a deus ex machina in the tragedy of American guilt and self-loathing. Not to go biblical, but his final act was divinely ironic: By his death, the man who lost his memory restored the nation's.

An eternal optimist, as everyone can't stop saying, Reagan embodied the spirit - dare we call it cowboy - that permitted America's founders a vision of freedom that, for all its unattractive manifestations, beats the alternative of terrorist rule every time.

It takes an optimist to decide, for instance, that communism isn't something to be tolerated as just another alternative lifestyle, as the ever-luminous Mark Steyn put it, but something to be condemned and obliterated. It takes an optimist to insist on Americans' capacity for self-government rather than to comfortably rely on "those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state," to use Reagan's words.

It also takes great courage.

At this time - which Reagan ironically missed as he wandered darkly through Alzheimer's cramped corridors - it is helpful to be reminded of what optimism and courage can accomplish. As history surely will judge, a free Iraq and an Arab world gradually transformed by democracy are the offspring of such optimism and courage. Continued...