SELLING DEMOCRACY to the Iraqis. Seems to me it will take some doings before these folks put collective good ahead of clan concerns. Maybe someone might point out that the latter is in large part responsible for the fact that they sit on the worlds greatest source of wealth, they manufacture and export virtually nothing but oil, the common arab family is among the poorest in the world and to many of them their heroes are maniacs who blow themselves up out of a blinding sense of hatred. Read the rest here.

Jeff Cantor has spent his adult life selling things — first fax machines, then pharmaceuticals. Now, in postwar Iraq, U.S Army Reserve Maj. Jeff Cantor is trying to sell something else: democracy.

It’s a different challenge entirely, and Cantor is going on instinct.

“It comes down to sales. You have to sell solutions to problems,” said Cantor, the U.S. official who helped design — and has overseen — the city council in Kirkuk, an ethnically divided oil town in northern Iraq. “The key is to get the people to buy into it.”