"Democracy at the polls is not a principle you can discard when inconvenient. For an external party to do so means delegitimizing the very process one has lauded as the key to self representation and accountable government. This is what the United States has done in the Middle East, repeatedly."

The West's American-led aggressive but inconsistent campaign in the post 9/11 decade to promote democracy in the greater Middle East has left a legible record. The eight year intrusion in Iraq and the ten years of concentrated effort at the reconstitution of Afghanistan, the contours of accomplishment (minimal) and failure (massive) are clear enough for us to reach a determination and to draw conclusions. The several country specific initiatives of the strategy form a tapestry too rich in its particulars to be examined in detail. Still, certain broad lessons can be identified.

1. Imposing democracy from the barrel of a gun is an improbable undertaking.

Violence is the enemy of democracy. For democracy's essence is wide agreement on the norms for conducting public life. That agreement is the basis for politics that excludes resort to coercive means. So doing presumes a basic accord that the status quo is minimally satisfactory in terms of both tolerance for the state of society and the methods for handling differences. Moreover, violence inflames passions in ways inimical to the restraint on ambition and action on which democracy relies. It propels the drive to power among victors; it stokes resentment and hopes for vengeance among losers. From a democratic perspective, each is a casualty of war.

If war is the enemy of democracy, civil strife is its nemesis. Foes - winners, vanquished, innocent victims - must live together. They cannot escape themselves, each other and the past. The deleterious effects for putting in place structures for peaceable intercourse are all the more severe where there is no previous experience of concord to look back on. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, earlier periods of domestic peace were marked by autocracy or tenuous co-existence among semi-autonomous sectarian groups. The latter is true as well of Lebanon.

As for Iraq, the notion that the toppling of a noxious regime by force somehow clears the ground for building a bright new political order is belied by history. As Paul Schroeder has remarked, "some people seem to think that states and their governments are somehow fungible, replaceable - that if one is destroyed or overthrown, another can take its place - and if the state or government overthrown was evil and dangerous, anything that replaces it will be better. Historical experience by and large teaches otherwise." In this respect, Americans and most Europeans differ. Schroeder's admonition rings true for the latter while the former tend to dismiss it as unhealthy pessimism. At work on the American side is the abundant faith in the power of enlightened thinking and good intentions. That optimism draws further confidence from rational techniques for mastering the human environment, social as well as physical. Technics and civilization itself are seen as inseparable. Blueprints for state-building, and even more audaciously nation building, form part of the same mindset as do 'smart' weapons for fighting an insurgency, and technology for upgrading oil fields. Here, too, there is the tenacious devotion to 'finishing what you start,' never to take 'no' for an answer, i.e. the compulsive stubbornness of the protestant ethic applied to a political project.

These are pronounced American attitudes and sentiments that few Europeans share - or, indeed, can share - given their keener awareness of rationality's limits, of hopes dashed, of all that can go wrong in human enterprises, of the evolutionary character of social construction. This goes far to explain the Europeans' distinct lack of enthusiasm for throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the Iraq project or the Afghan project. Rhetoric aligns itself with American declarations. Action does not. Iraq is viewed as an outright failure; in fact, a counterproductive one from the standpoint of regional stability and fighting al-Qaeda. A modicum of stability is the best they can imagine. A working democracy is unimaginable. So long as the two are conflated in official American thinking, so long as the United States judges it necessary to use military force in a non-discriminating way, there is little the Europeans can see themselves contributing to reaching a less rather than more undesirable outcome. Even if they were disposed to exert themselves, which they are not. The near total lack of political will renders questions of their preferred approach moot.

The Afghan situation is not identical, but similar. Western style liberal democracy seems as far-fetched there as in Iraq, even if the social and political divides run along somewhat different axes. Here too, the background of thirty years of civil war creates the very subjective conditions that are antithetical to the political culture of democracy. (In effect, the post-invasion strife of Iraq has compressed into five years what Afghanistan has experienced in thirty). A difference is that in the latter one can imagine a political modus vivendi producing a modicum of stability if one key condition were met: military suppression and political containment of the Taliban. There, an anti-terrorism policy and a state-building policy at least are on convergent tangents. That is the logic that keeps Europeans in the game.

2. Democracy is an organic product.

That lapidary statement has two implications. First, it should be adapted to a local environment. Second, it fares best when cultivated by natives of that locale. These are banal truths. Yet, they are too often elided by aggressive external promoters of democracy. This is especially true in the Middle East. Understandably so. A light touch and an appreciation of socio-cultural distance mean uncertainty as to outcome and, most surely, a longish time frame. That is unacceptable when the stakes of foreign parties, the West, are high; when they see an immediate threat, i.e. transnational terrorism; and when democracy now has been posited as the sine qua non for ensuring a satisfactory state of affairs in the near future. Thus, we have the problem of American hyper-activism. Thus, we have the quandary of European hesitancy about what is the correct course and ambivalence about being forced by dint of circumstances to follow in the wake of America. Left to their own devices, most European leaders would concentrate on stability in the near term while making restrained attempts to encourage the lineaments of democracy, thinking and institutions. By contrast, the American comfort with the status quo has more to do with the compatibility of its foreign policy objectives with the existing authoritarian regimes own domestic and external interests.

There are a number of concrete implications. One, the physical presence of a foreign power that has taken the liberty of casting itself as the benevolent tutor in democracy tarnishes both message and messenger. No people like being dictated to by others. This is doubly so when the tutor carries with it so much negative baggage as the United States does in the Middle East. Occupation always turns opinion against the occupier. The longer, more troubled the occupation the more intense the negative reactions. Consequently, America finds itself on the horns of a dilemma in both Iraq and Afghanistan. To achieve the stated military objectives means a wide, deep 'footprint.' Moreover, in the case of the former, the United States' long-term objective remains to turn Iraq into a pliable instrument of American military and political strategy in the Greater Middle East. The public perception is that its billion dollar Raj Bhavan of an Embassy complex, 1,000 staff, four giant redesigned air bases, and economic domination are not integral to an 'imperial' design. Facts on the ground say otherwise. Most important, that is how it is seen by Iraqis. Realpolitik logic says: given the perceived security stakes, think stability and control first and put democracy promotion in a lower category. The problem is that American leaders have justified the entire enterprise in terms of bringing peace and stability to the region via democracy. That is the way it has been sold to the local population, to the world, to the American public and to themselves.

Displays of military prowess by external parties have the additional adverse effect of strengthening the conviction that only the powerful dictate policies and control the future. Unable to match the sheer force of the West, the United States and Israel especially, feelings of impotence nurture the dream of a savior - that is to say, the heroic figure whose steely will and inspiring mien can mobilize Muslims to thwart the foreign enemy. The keen sense of historical grievance, of the mythical past, and the lack of self confidence in Islamic societies in their ability to build power through sustained effort a la China contribute to the living dream of the man on a white stallion. The point is not just to regain respect and righteousness for their own worth, but rather to regain the might that can give them tangible meaning. That calls for a hero. It is a yearning that too readily opens the way for a demagogue. Democracy offers but a pale substitute.

3. Democracy promotion is not a laboratory experiment that can be run, and rerun, as strikes one's fancy.

A second implication of the "organic" proposition is that outside parties should avoid meddling in local politics once a constitution is in place. Elections must be free of interference by the tutelary power (where there is one) if they are to be true expressions of the popular will and seen as such. This rule has been routinely violated by the United States in Iraq. Washington provided money and technical advice to its favorites, especially the secular coalition led by Aliya Alawi. To no avail. The American Ambassadors, Khalilazad, Crocker and Hill, have been constant players in the innermost councils so as to broker leadership deals congenial to the United States. Those efforts are punctuated by the hortatory visits of senior officials from Washington. All have failed as successive prime Ministers have become progressively more insistent in throwing off the American yoke.

Any short term success that might have been registered would have had the negative spin off of compromising the very democratic process that is the centerpiece of longer term hopes for the country. It undercuts the principle of free and equal access to the polls. Moreover, those wielding governmental power lose authority and legitimacy. As a result, the underlying tension between security aims and democracy promotion becomes exacerbated. For Iraq, that means that any government that has broad popular support will be inclined to show the United States the door. Any government that accepts the status of de facto protectorate will not have broad popular support.

4. In short, power politics and democracy promotion do not mix.

The 'organic' imperative of democracy development dictates that election results be accepted as authoritative, however unpalatable the winners may be. Democracy at the polls is not a principle you can discard when inconvenient. For an external party to do so means delegitimizing the very process one has lauded as the key to self representation and accountable government. This is what the United States has done in the Middle East, repeatedly. In Iraq, it has played favorites in the various ways just indicated. In Lebanon, it strives to depict Hezbollah as a non-Lebanese tool of Syria while backing Israeli and Lebanese attempts to suppress or to curb it. In Algeria in the early 1990s, it gave tacit support to the government's cancellation of scheduled elections in expectation of a victory by Islamist parties. More recently, it lifted the pressure on President Mubarak of Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood's popularity became evident. Most egregious, is its attitude toward the electoral success of Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories. Washington has been complicit with the Israeli government to annul the results of the free elections that gave Hamas a surprise victory over Fatah. Going well beyond withholding formal recognition, the United States actively has cooperated in a multifaceted campaign to topple the government. The strategy has included imprisonment of legislators and ministers, the draconian blockade of Gaza that punishes civilians, and the arming of Fatah militias for an armed challenge that failed when preempted by Hamas fighters. In Palestine, both American interests and the idea of democracy have fallen victim to ill-conceived, seemingly expedient actions.

To entangle support for democratic process with outcome preferences is to distort the very meaning of the political ideas supposedly being advocated. Perhaps the gravest risk is to reinforce already rampant impressions that elections are appealing only because they open an avenue to gaining power for oneself, one's clan, one's sect, one's associates. It is a zero-sum contest - winner take as much as he can. Due process, legal constraint, self-imposed restraint, coalescing for the common good - all these notions come less naturally. They are often subordinate to partisan ambition. Meddling by an external party to favor one group or another confirms belief that this is what democracy really is all about. To go a step further in punishing uncongenial winners strengthens the cynicism.

5. External parties should recognize that cultural distance is a serious handicap.

Societies differ in some fundamental attributes. Cognitive maps of how the world, and important segments of it, work are not the same. Nor are belief systems, historical experience, stratification systems and religious affiliations the same. That is why the saga of democracy is marked by a diversity of trajectories. That is why democracy of today in any given country is not what it was yesterday or may be tomorrow. That also is why the forms and modalities of what we call constitutional or liberal democracies do not match exactly. Prudence, therefore, is called for. It is a mistake to think in terms of templates; even worse to think of force feeding a country's populace with a one size fits all model.

An extreme form of the last is visible in Iraq. The overwhelming evidence is that for a foreign country volitionally to take custody of an ancient, complex society that is part of a distant and alien civilization is a recipe for failure. It is self-delusion to believe that America in Iraq, or in any roughly analogous situation, can mold it to the former's specifications. All the less so when other, self-interested purposes are being served as the expense of neighbors who have their own direct and immediate interests. This bespeaks a hubris that leads to actions that are antithetical to the light hand and prudence that are prerequisite for constructive engagement in support of democracy.

The audacious American projects in Iraq and Afghanistan represent the antithesis of this approach. The moral, philosophical and historical elements of American culture-blind optimism are accompanied by an instrumental optimism. There is an American propensity to see life as a continuing string of challenges to ingenuity and applied reason whose solution amounts to another step on the way to a better life - be it individual or collective, material or moral. The 'can-do' ethic is quintessentially of the United States, as is the term itself. The dedication to reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq on a foundation of democratic politics and market economics was in line with this mentality. To take on the formidable task of remaking a society with which there are no historical ties or cultural and religious affinities requires a self-confidence and a belief in social engineering that no European country could muster - or even would dream of. The rejoinder made by architects and supporters of the Iraqi enterprise to their doubting critics was to refer them to the great postwar successes in Germany and Japan. Basic differences of background and circumstance were fudged in keeping with an American disposition to downplay the significance of national peculiarities - except America's own. We are reminded of Shakespeare's rendering of Henry V's admonition to his bishops as the invasion of France loomed:

"Now we are well resolved; and by God's help,
And yours, the noble sinews of our power,
(Iraq) being ours, we'll bend it to our awe"

The last line is equally prescient:

"Or break it all to pieces"

6. Democratic development presumes a coherent society and a competent state.

That hard lesson should have been learned from experience in much of the post-colonial world, by no means in the Middle East alone. So, too, it is instructive to review the history of established democracies where we have a long record of the interplay among nationalism, state building and democracy. In all cases except the United States, a central state apparatus antedated moves toward democracy. Looking at current cases, it is doubtful that Afghanistan ever has had such, even during the period of communist rule and Soviet occupation. The closest approximation, ironically, was the Taliban regime that existed for six years. Iraq had a fragmented, weak state headed by a British imposed monarch from Arabia until it fell under Ba'athist dictatorship. The structures of governance they built were dismantled by the American occupation. The term 'IRAQ' itself should be read as a pronoun with multiple antecedent nouns. Viable states do exist elsewhere in the Middle East. All are under authoritarian rule with the exception of Lebanon. State building per se is an accomplished fact. It is the transformation of non-democratic polities into coherent societies cum polities that is the challenge.

By a coherent society I mean a society wherein the primary allegiance is to the country, i.e. the comprehensive social unit within its political boundaries. Plural identities and allegiances are compatible with working democracies. A casual survey confirms that proposition. Sects, clans, tribes, associations of all kinds are not in themselves antithetical to social cohesion, as witness India. It is where they compete with the larger collectivity in terms of loyalty, obligation - and are resistant to the setting/observance of common rules essential to a reasonably integrated socio-politico-economic entity - that particularisms militate against political coherence. On this score, there is great variation in the Middle East. It ranges from the tight bonds of national cohesion that characterize Tunisia and Egypt to a fractured Lebanon. It is largely a coincidence that the two places where the West in engaged in hands-on democracy installation, Afghanistan and Iraq, are close to the 'incoherent' end of the continuum.

Participants in the debate over democracy promotion in the GME now agree on the axiom that the fostering of democratic institutions and practices can succeed only if the process is sensitive to cultural and social circumstances. Those circumstances include past experiences with diverse modes of political life. Considerable discussion has addressed the issue of whether all societies are equally accommodating to democracy. When posed in the abstract, the proposition defies validation or invalidation. There are too many intervening variables, the empirical data too varied, to allow for confident conclusions. That should not stand in the way of a rigorous assessment of how, when and to what degree identifiable factors within a given Islamic country affect its receptivity and adaptability to democracy.

Democracy itself is composed of multiple elements. One needs to separate its different ingredients and then use each as a benchmark against which to gauge a given country's approximation to it. They include: the legitimization of rulers through open, competitive elections; the representation of the populace through those elected officials; legal limits on how the holders of governmental office exercise state powers; and the protection of individual human rights against abuse by political authorities. Differentiation among these components enhances the analytical value of an approach that is historically informed and culturally sensitive.

Practical Lessons for Outsiders:

• Act and speak sotto voce
• Keep as low a profile as circumstances permit
• Bear this in mind before making decisions that could lead to an active, physical presence
• Recognize that the use of violent force has an enormous downside
• Encourage local initiative wherever possible; make that 'possible' broad and elastic
• Anything that weakens central authority is liable to prove a liability
• Do not underestimate the intrinsic contradictions between those ends served by stability and democracy promotion
• Be sensitive to cultural distinctiveness
• Deconstruct the concept and practice of democracy so as avoid the inclination to advertise and to promote only one fully formed model of democracy
• Recognize that the modeling of a practicing democracy remains the West's strongest asset

Michael Brenner is Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program, University of Texas at Austin