Mark Steyn makes a cogent point:

It’s easy to imagine an Iraq with three regional parliaments in Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, harder to foresee a single legislature filled by members of nationwide parties. But if it ever happens it will be the very last piece of the puzzle. Americans understand this: the original colonists learned self-government in their towns and their states and eventually applied it to an entire continent.

By contrast, those European sophisticates sneering that Washington won’t stay the course are often the same crowd who’ve found it easier to elevate the friendliest local strongman than create a durable constitutional culture. Dominique de Villepin, the ubiquitous Frenchman, declared the other day that Paris was indispensable to postwar reconstruction because it had so much experience in Africa. I don’t know about you, but I think Iraq deserves better than to be the new Chad or Ivory Coast.

If democracy in Iraq is to be successful, the culture of democracy must take root first. If the people believe in and understand self-government, the details of the form of their government are almost irrelevant.

By the way, I'm keeping the "Support Democracy in Iraq" graphic and link for now, since I consider the current phase in the liberation and reinvention of Iraq to be, if anything, more important than the war itself, and more prone to failure. World War II might have wrecked a large part of Western civilization were it not for the Marshall Plan that followed; and all Frog-bashing aside, that would have been a very bad thing, the fecklessness of Chirac and de Villepin notwithstanding.