Among the buzz today is a statement Bush made yesterday about Democracy in Japan and Germany after World War II. In an effort to bolster his argument that what he’s doing in Iraq is the right thing, he stated (accurately) that there were a lot of naysayers that didn’t believe that Japan and Germany could be democratized after WWII. They were.
Of course he left out a very important fact that made democracy possible in Japan and Germany. In order for it to work, the U.S. Occupation Government in both countries had to ban the largest obstacle to Democracy in both cases. In Germany (which democratically elected the Nazi government), Nazism had to be outlawed. In Japan, emperor worship had to be outlawed. If it remained, the people would simply have voted the emperor back into power and brought back the status quo.
So what does the occupation government in Iraq have to ban in order for Democracy to work? Islam. Is that going to happen? Most definitely not. If they could get over the PC reaction back home, they would still have to deal with over a billion non-Iraqi Muslims that would react very negatively, and would see it as the religious war that Bush claims not to be fighting.
It was easy to ban Japanese emperor worship, as all adherents were in Japan. However, most Muslims do NOT live in Iraq.
If you bring Democracy to Iraq, it will be no different than democracy in the Palestinian territories, which voted overwhelmingly for Hamas to take power; or Turkey, which has had several elections overturned by the secular military. Absent that safeguard, Iraq will only devolve into a mullahocracy.