Don't Bet on Democracy

In a disturbing column about post-Saddam Iraq, Georgie Anne Geyer writes:

Iraq is the least likely country in the world to be "democratized."
Not only are economic and social problems there so intense as to undermine basic stability in the region for years…but even if some form of democratic government took form, the spoils would go to fundamentalist Islamists deeply hostile to the United States.

Her source? A State Department document that first saw public light last week in The LA Times.

If the State Department report, produced by its prestigious Bureau of Intelligence and Research and provocatively named "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes," is correct, this war is truly being fought for a series of dangerous and deliberately orchestrated delusions, writes Geyer.

Chief among them is the notion that a flowering democracy in Iraq will be like a city on a hill to other Middle Eastern countries.