Your points about various things that have occurred in Iraq towards becoming a democracy such as voting and free press are certainly valid but those improvements have to include a semblence of stability, national pride, and cultural unity or they're simply a house of cards.

What good is a free press if the various factions use it to inflame their particular sect in violence towards all others?

What good is voting if majority rule ends up placing a fundamentalist Shiite majority in power with thoughts of revenge over their former Sunni ruling class? How can we view a move from a somewhat secular government (brutal though it might have been) to a government controlled by chauvinistic mullahs aligned to Iran as a step forward?

I think we pin way too much on the word "democracy". It is more than just voting and the Bill of Rights that gave us our greatness. Look at our early Constitution for example. Even though it had noble ideals behind it, it still allowed incredible disparity in human potential based on race, gender, and economic status. What got us to the powerhouse and unified culture we are today is too complicated to wrap up in a few democratic milestones. We had incredible amounts of natural resources including huge amounts of open and virtually uninhabited land to expand into. We had basically a common language and religion. We had common adversity and hardship that tended to bind us together. We had a slave population that added to our economic strength. (I'm not advocating this by the way). We had amazing luck as well. A few inches either way in bullet travel and we'd have lost some of our most influential leaders. Those leaders were unusual as well for the times. It's been well documented that a great deal of the original framers were extremely free thinkers, unbound by religious dogma that had so hampered their European counterparts.

Let's also not forget that we are not a true democracy. We should be spreading republics not democracies. They have a balance that is designed to protect the minority and the powerless.

I hope you're right that Iraq is on the right path but they are nowhere near the "marvel of democracy" I alluded to.

Art