I'm struck by the degree to which power in Iraq, and indeed the Arab world, is personal rather than institutional. The civil war consists of strong charismatic religious leaders and their fighting forces struggling for dominance.

You make a very good point here, and in the rest of your post.

If you look at Arab/Middle Eastern nations in history that HAVE made a lot of progress toward Western prosperity, if not always Western political values, some strong leader was almost always the driver.

Turkey owes whatever current secularism it now has to Ataturk. Egypt's history is a string of strong leaders, some good, some not so good. The King of Jordan. The House of Saud.

Whatever else you can say about the Shah of Iran, he took Iran into the 20th century, and like those here (and "realists" elsewhere) who say the area would be a lot more stable if Saddam were still there, you could make a good case that if the Shah's dynasty still ran Iran, a lot of the current crap would not be happening. It would still be an abusive government (although I don't think it ever got as bad as Saddam's), but the Islamists would be less of an influence. In Turkey and Egypt, Islamic influences are currently suppressed by less-than-democratic methods.

Is this a good thing? Democracy is the method that allows people to have the maximum say in their own government, but without some overriding institution (culture, constitution, etc.), it is not stable. A "pure" democracy would suck. Imagine all the things that could be put up to majority vote in America if the Constitution and the courts enforcing it didn't exist.

Where should the line be drawn in the Middle East? Can a philosophy like radical Islamism, with the methods (not always peaceful persuasion) it uses, be suppressed effectively in a Muslim nation without methods any American or other Westerner would consider unreasonable?

Was the biggest mistake in Iraq not replacing Saddam with a new Ataturk? And who would that have been? Not Chalabi, that's for sure. I actually had high hopes for Sistani early on, since he seemed to be convinced (at least more than most religious leaders) that Islam should not be absolute in secular issues. Of course, how much of that was sincere, I don't know. Now Sistani seems to have washed his hands of the whole thing, and left the Shiite field to Sadr.

Milaki is too dependent on Sadr, and doesn't show the leadership needed. If there's anyone else in the Iraqi bullpen, I don't know who it is.

If we had let the U.S. military run Iraq for the first few years, like in Japan, would things have been any worse? I can think of ways it could have gone a lot better, but I can also think of an insurgency that would have been much more powerful without the elections.

We shouldn't be too smug about this kind of thing. For most of our history, Western societies were ruled in almost exactly the same way, and prosperity or disaster in a nation depended on whether you had a good king or a bad king. Kind of like elections now, only having to wait a LOT more than eight years to get a change.

An old Russian saying goes, "Best government: good Czar. Worst government: bad Czar. Trouble is, way more bad Czars than good Czars."

You're way ahead of me in the report. I have a project to finish today, and am listening to NASA briefings now.