---

Everything but war made the difference
If President Bush is right about the way to build democracy in the Middle East—to eject forcibly a bad government, install a formally democratic replacement, and let the spillover begin—then we know where we should look for democracy's greatest triumphs over the last two decades: Cambodia, where the United States supported Japan, Australia, and the United Nations in a massive post-conflict exercise in free elections and democracy-building. We would expect spillover to Cambodia's unfree neighbors Vietnam and Laos;

Bosnia and Kosovo, where conflicts were followed by free elections and newly-democratic structures of governance, overseen by U.S. soldiers and international funding at much higher per capita rates than in Iraq. Popular democracies there should have spread calm to troubled neighbors Serbia and Macedonia;

Liberia, which by now should be exporting high-quality democracy to Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Cote d'Ivoire; and the all-time champion, Haiti, where, after U.S.-led interventions under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, waves of Haitian democracy should be lapping at the shores of Cuba by now.

If President Bush is right about the best way to promote democracy in the Middle East, then you'd expect the signal triumphs of democratization in the last 20 years to be clustered around other places where bad governments were replaced through international force.

Indeed, good-faith efforts were made to build democracy in all those places. The results, though, are mixed at best. ...

...Democracy comes dropping slowly, after years of determined domestic opposition and international support have worn down or modified authoritarian regimes. Think South Africa, South Korea, Chile, Ghana, Mali, and Benin.

Or democracy seems to come quickly, even opportunistically, after the death of a leader, an external event, or a sham election provides domestic activists the spark they need to engage the masses. Think Central Europe in 1989, but also the 2002 rejection of President Moi's chosen successor in Kenya, the response to the deaths of Arafat, Abacha, and, more recently, the reformers who arose out of bungled electoral frauds in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. ...