As for the quality of Iraqi democracy it is hardly set in stone yet. I prefer to talk about consensual government, which may be democratic or may differ from that somewhat, so long as it fits the consensual ideas of the culture. Democracy will have to adapt to Muslim/Arab culture, just as democracy has had to adapt to various other cultures. Japanese democracy is not the same as American or French. Why should we expect Arab democracy to be the same as ours? Yet people scream to high heaven when it seems to differ.

Let’s have a bit less self-reighteous carping from Americans about this. Before we get too critical of Iraqis how about going and cleaning up the incredibly corrupt Democratic Party machines in Chicago and New Orleans. We see daily stories of ACORN trying to steal the election this year through vote fraud. The Iraqis have had democratic government for only three years after 24 years of Saddam, 21 previous years of Pan-Arab nationalist fascism, and previous to that authoritarian royal rule by an Arab dyansty imposed by the British. We are giving the Iraqis the opportunity to make their own future, not imposing some utopian social engineering on them.

He starts off noting how dysfunctional Arab political culture is, but then writes how he and his wife “…both thought that a shock to the system and a scheme to jar at least one Arab country onto the right track might be worth it. In the end, we both decided that it would be a bad idea, and for good conservative reasons. Utopian social programs rarely work domestically, in circumstances in which the architects of social engineering share a language and culture with their subjects and in which the surrounding society is stable and prosperous. If this is the case, how can we expect a radical experiment in social engineering to succeed in a foreign country with a radically different culture, and in which distrust of the United States is imbibed with mother’s milk? Arabs are fixated enough on what they perceive as past humiliations, how can adding another defeat to the list help them?”

He continues: “Subsequent rationales for the war were not convincing. Engage the terrorists in Iraq or face them here? Does anyone really believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a one-way ticket to the US and a scholarship at a flight school but decided to turn around and have a go at us in Iraq after he heard about the invasion? Iraq, in fact, supplies a theater for attacking the US that most of the fighters there, foreign and Iraqi, would not have if we had not given it to them.”

The e-mailer concludes: “Now, we are stuck fighting to try to democratize a polity that is inherently unstable. If there are democratic elections, the result is not likely to be a liberal democracy, but rather one of the illiberal sort. Defeat would be a disaster, victory will be hard to define and unlikely to bring great reward.”

Four years after the e-mail was written, it’s pretty obvious that the e-mailer was correct. The best anyone can hope for in non-Kurdish Iraq is the establishment of a creakily functioning pseduo-democracy that’s only one shove away from collapsing into civil war, just like Lebanon before the Lebanese civil war. That’s better than Ba’athist tyranny, but there’s little evidence that Iraq is inspiring democratic reform anywhere else in the Arab world.

There were many reasons to go into Iraq, Bush most loudly cited WMD (due to the lack of courage and clear-thinking on the part of our lovely world community) but there were many valid reasons. We’ll see how the experiment goes, but as noted above, letting the Muslims live at the mercy of their beloved extremists was an eye-opener they could not have experienced if we simply hunkered down while they cheered their jihadi brethren.