In the second presidential debate of 2000, George W. Bush said in criticism of Somalia:
"Started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission, and that's where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price. And so I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war."
"I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That's what it's meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops."
"I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the extra strategy obvious."
As somebody trained in Political Science, and somebody reasonably well-read on the history, cultures, religions, and current dynamics of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, I would say that anybody (let alone a President surrounded by so-called experts) who could imagine that there was the necessary social, political, media, and legal framework in Iraq to create a functioning democracy has the IQ of a sack full of hammer handles.
It is not elections that define a democracy; hell almost every country in the world has elections of greater or lesser fairness. Saddam even had elections, as do Cuba, Iran, and a host of other countries that even Bush can understand are not democracies.
Democracy requires a populace that has agreed upon what some call a "Social Contract." A Social Contract derives from the idea of the consent of the governed. It requires that the citizens accept the premise that each individual will subject him or herself to the civil law and legitimate political authority, and that all citizens will agree to go along with the will of the majority (given social and legal protections to prevent the rise of a "tyranny of the majority").
An additional problem is that every study ever done on the Muslim peoples of the Middle East and Persian Gulf shows that, at best, only a small minority are in the least interested in a western-style democracy with its tolerance for secularism and diversity. Like Christianity before the Renaissance and the Enlightenment began to weaken its grip on Europe, Islam of today makes no distinction between the religious and political systems of a nation.
Western Democracy is anathema to most of these people, and anybody who believes it is worth sacrificing thousands of American lives, and hundreds of billions (ultimately trillions) in American treasury to attempt to create a Democracy in a country as volatile as Iraq is deluded.
Robert Frost advised that, before you tear a fence down, you find out why it was erected in the first place. For all his brutality to his own countrymen, Saddam was a fence against the internecine hatreds and power rivalries within Iraq, and, more importantly, a fence between Iran and the Middle East, a region they have long wanted to expand their influence into. Bush tore down that fence without a clue of what it was containing, either within Iraq or throughout the region, and so had no plans to handle the consequences.
You would stand a better chance of teaching a three-day-dead mackerel to tap dance than trying to turn that area into a wonderland of Jeffersonian Democracy, Wal-Marts, Starbucks, and a Freidmaniac free market.
