It doesn't come easy.
I don't agree with everything this author says...but I think he makes excellent points about the difficulties in getting to democracy.
It's hard designing a transition to democracy.
Maybe democracy will take in Iraq, maybe it won't, but I hope our experience with Iraq gives us a nudge toward appreciating our own democracy, which too many of us take for granted, and too few of us understand.
Watching democracy being tried there and in Haiti, Russia and numerous other places around the world, nothing is clearer than how difficult a plant it is to cultivate.
So many things have to be in place for a democracy to work...
We had to fight the Civil War before we really became a nation instead of a collection of states whose interests lay primarily within their own borders. It was that war that led people to change their grammar: They stopped saying the United States are, and started saying the United States is.
Read the history of any democracy you choose, and you'll see that it didn't come easily or quickly — not in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. Its evolution can take decades, sometimes centuries. OK, maybe Canada had no problems (no, wait, there is still that French/English thing). Political marriage is hard work, and the work is never done.
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