Will USmilitary & OILCO'S be able to force American-style Democracy on Iraqi Moslems however long we R there?

Question

There are other lessons from history to suggest otherwise according to this article from The Christian Science Monitor:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080701/cm_csm/yharrison

Consider what happened with US occupation in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. By Lawrence E. Harrison

Tue Jul 1, 4:00 AM ET

Sen. JohN MCCAIN recently suggested that pacification of Iraq and the departure of American forces was feasible by 2013. But pacification of Iraq is not how President Bush defines success.

The president recently restated his goal: to transform Iraq into democratic-capitalist modernity, much as Germany and Japan had been transformed during the military occupations that followed their defeat in World War II.

But Iraq is an Arab country, and no Arab country has yet been able to consolidate democracy, and that includes Jordan and Lebanon, the two that are most developed. Literacy rates illustrate the difficulty of modernizing Iraq: in 2003/04, 57 percent of women

Answer 1

I think history gives us every reason to doubt that even the McCain plan of a century of occupation of Iraq will yield any sort of real representative democracy there.  Iraq is an artificial country created by the British, and in addition to the religious and ethnic division in the country (Shia / Sunni / Kurd), there is also the fact that, like most Arab countries, tribal afficiliation is still more important than any sense of national solidarity.  Democracy does not sprout from the mussle of a rifle.  In the cases of Germany and Japan (which have, arguably, developped western-style democracy under occupation), both had some history of native democracy and democratic ideals prior to the occupation.  That's just not so in Iraq.