Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.
They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.
If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
The Western concept of democracy is based on the idea that the loser of an election has the possibility next time round of being the winner. But in the case of an ethnically or religiously divided country, in which minorities don't live peacefully together, this necessary balance can't be properly guaranteed by democracy. When each ethnic group arms itself, it is not surprising that the army of a new state is viewed by part of the population as an ideological militia.
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