Selil,

Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" had some interesting points about how many of the problems we have in dealing with Islamic cultures comes from their adherence to religious, cultural and tribal identities over national boundaries. We think of Iranians, Iraqis, Afghanis...they think of Shi'a, Sunni, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Persians, al-Sauds, Wahhabists, Hashemites, etc. It's just such a fragmented system that they follow that I wonder how anyone could have believed that Western democratization would be able to take hold as Bush was proposing.

Of course, the confusion is somewhat understandable since in the case of many of those countries (Afghanistan to name a prominent example) the people of the region weren't the ones who drew up national boundaries...Western nations were (as with the Durand Line, which the Pashtuns largely don't recognize). That's not really anyone's fault today, and certainly not Bush's of course, but it's something we should be aware of when engaging in that region with an eye towards reform.