Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Band 54, Heft 2, S. 42-43

Abstract

Four years after the war for democracy in Iraq began, it is evident that the project has failed dismally. Many analysts attribute this to flawed implementation. Although there is no denying that there were gross mistakes, the failure had much more to do with conceptual flaws and total lack of comprehension of, or worse still, disregard for Iraq's history and its problems. Had the project's architects taken these into account, they would not have opted to make Iraq the model democracy for the Arab world, even if only for lip service.