Maybe some bad news for Iraq
 

Ummm...
Democracy will have to wait, US tells Iraq
Lead: "United States military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, instead installing their own hand-picked mayors and administrators, many of them former Iraqi military leaders."

This can't be good.

nice parallelism on the thread titles!

anyway, what if they do hold elections and the bath party wins? do we invalidate the elections?

History has shown over and over again that you can't jump straight from an oppressive regime to a democracy. You have to take it in steps or the people won't be able to handle it. Just look what happenned to the soviet union after it broke up.

well, look @ british colonies.

i know for a fact that india, after independence went straight to democracy and have stayed on that course.

Check this out:
http://tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?threadid=14378

lol, but this is india!

Damn! We finally figured out the problem - No Dude, This is not India - Texas is not in India - somewhere in your past you left India, at least physically.

Now check this out:
http://tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?threadid=14378

As far as colonies go, just take a look at Africa.... India is obviously an exception.

I think you are all missing the point. Democracy works best when the people demand it for themselves and set up their own systems. When its imposed from outside, things are much more difficult, for one thing the new system will have problems with legitimacy, also they are succeptable to corruption.

I dont mean to suggest that it is always this way, one notable exception is Japan. The US was very sucessful at setting up a postwar government in Japan (although it has its own problems with corruption and legitimacy), but it took several years and an incredible ammount of money to do it.

Personally I think the Bush administration underestimated the ammount of work involved, not that it cannot be done.

The interesting thing about Japan is that we conditionalized their surrender, by letting them keep their Emperor as a figurehead. I think that if we did not let them keep their Emperor, there would have been a much greater resistance to changing governments and the US occupation. Many Japanese of the time rationalized it as 'the Emperor is OK with it, so are me'.

Actually it was an unconditional surrender.

Your right that keeping the Emperor served US interests, really he should have been tried as a war criminal.

The Emperor was against the war. Already before WWII, he was just a puppet for the Japanese hawks.

this meaning the previous reference i made

But democracy was working so well for Iraq. Why would the US do this?