[Cyrus]

Some analysts are aguing that newly evolving and semi-stable democracies can actually be a lot more bellicose or even belligerent than pure dictatorships or old, historical democracies. (There's a book that's recently out on this theme.)

The reason is that leaders in such "democracies" cannot rely on pure force to retain power, e.g. explicit domestic repression, so they resort to the lowest common denominator of human passions -- usually extreme nationalism -- to "get the votes". The case made by the emergent republics in former USSR is devastating in this context, as is also the case made by former Soviet bloc countries in the Balkans.

So the United States might end up in Iraq with a regime that's stable enough to allow a dignified exit of those damn U.S. troops (who continue to get annoyingly killed every day) yet unstable enough to affect the whole region's peace once again. Shiites against Sunni Jordan? Sunnis against Shiite Iran? Kurds against Turks? Combinations thereof? Pick yer poison, those analysts say.

In restrospect, those (otherwise hawkish) analysts conclude that a Saddam Hussein who would have been tamed enough and brought to his senses enough and made pliable enough (through the methods that now seem, again in restrospect, to have been succeeding towards such an objective), would have been the West's best option to keep the lid on and hold together what is called Iraq.

...By the way, the same analysts have studied the history (last 30 years more or less) of belligerent, extreme Islam and the pattern shows that the foreigners now fighting against the American troops in Iraq will go on to become (and I quote) "the shock troops of worldwide muslim terror".

Nice.