Ready for Democracy

Submitted by Ted Volckhausen (United States), Feb 12, 2003 at 15:05

In 1967, at Fort Benning, Georgia, an instructor in an officer candidate class talked about countries with no democratic tradition and said that it would in all likelihood be futile to try to make them democracies.

His primary example of such a country was Portugal.

Iraq is not Portugal, but his remarks are enough to show that we don't know what the preconditions for democracy are. The difficult question is: how much worse off are we if we try and fail? My guess is, probably not much.

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