Silly Thinking

Despite the mythology of the US as a beacon of democracy around the world this country has tended, almost uniformly, to support dictatorships.

Currently there is a lot of hot wind blowing about democratizing Iraq, but now even this highly specious argument has been deflated. The Bush administration has recently made it clear that nobody should expect any sort of democracy to emerge in Iraq:

From the Observer:
"In an interview with The Observer, Kanan Makiya, an adviser to Iraq's main opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, said America now appeared to have dumped its commitment to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq. Instead, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, Washington was preparing to leave Iraq under the control of President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party."
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,896778,00.html