[magician]

Not to get into a discourse on political science here, and by no means do I wish to offend anyone, but strictly speaking, America is not really a genuine democracy, either.

In fact, I do not believe that there is a nation on earth that is truly a democracy, as defined in any basic political science text book. Those countries that are "free," to an extent, have democratic traditions and institutions. But all nations are mixtures, and all are different.

As for Thailand....I must say, it has been educational living here.

If you badmouth the king, or the institutions of the monarchy, you are literally liable to have the holy shit kicked out of you. You will go to jail. With bruises. The monarchy is off limits for critical discourse.

Like TR....and I hate to say it, I think that some form of benevolent dictatorship may end up emerging in Iraq, and countries like it. Such political structures inevitably generate internal opposition, and over time, internal stresses can lead either to political change, or to conflict. Healthy polities evolve versions of democracy and free enterprise, and I do believe that it is possible for these features to emerge over time in distressed states. Look at China. It is still ruled by a communist party. But change is occuring there, even there, in what is arguably the oldest and most traditional country on earth. The change is driven by free, or somewhat free, enterprise. And by the free flow of ideas (China tries to put the internet genie back into the bottle, but it is too late), and by the interaction of cultures.

But I think that it is idealistic of us, as Americans, to hope that we can successfully transplant democratic institutions and traditions to countries with no history of them. I know that many Iraqis that I met were nostalgic for certain features of the Saddam days. They missed having reliable electricty, cheap and plentiful benzine, clean water...and they all pointed out that there was no anarchy in the streets. If you drove like an idiot, went the wrong way on a one way street, you were liable to be shot. Everything flowed in patrimonial fashion from the state.

Now, as anyone knows who has been to Iraq since the fall of Saddam, driving there is worse than driving virtually anywhere else on the planet. In fact, much of the country is de facto chaos.

It is a toss up, in my mind, whether Iraq as a contiguous state will survive. My money is on a loose federation, with an increasingly autonomous Kurdish north, a Shia south increasingly aligned with Iran....and a middle area of Sunnis, living worse than the Palestinians in the Jordanian refugee camps or areas around Israel proper.

It is up to Iraqis, of course. If this transpires, then Iraqis will have no one to blame but themselves. America, and Americans, have given them the best chance that they could ever expect to start over, from scratch. If they choose to waste it, then there is not much that America or Americans can do about it.

For myself, I look forward to a day when I can return to Kurdistan. Wonderful people. Wonderful country. The rest of that country....I will refrain from expressing my opinions.

The alternative....if a cohesive, coherent Iraqi state is to survive...I believe that it will be because a form of benign dictatorship emerges. Dictatorship is what the Iraqi people know, and frankly, the average guy on the street just wants to make a living, and not be persecuted. They want to worship God in their own fashion, they want to be safe from mafias, safe from the secret police, and they want a viable standard of living.

It would be enough, in my mind, if some form of state were to emerge that enabled Sunni and Shia to live without conflict. I do not see this happening. I think that this schism within Islam has yet to be resolved, and it will play out over the coming decades. As infidel invaders, we merely distracted them from their primary focus, which was persecuting heretics.

The one thing that we accomplished, which more than any other fact mitigates in favor of Iraq (and this is one of the things of which we should be most proud), is the emergence of free enterprise. If we can help the state hold itself together, and simply hold off the insurgency long enough to help a viable middle class emerge...then something good might survive.

Again, I am not optimistic.