This is somewhat of a rambling post, but I'm pressing "submit reply" anyway.

To answer the question, another question may be worth pondering. Why have some countries not converted to democracy?

I was re-reading Bernard Lewis’ piece in the latest Foreign Affairs (March/April 2009) and I thought his description of the models of Arab governance was interesting. Starting on page 86, he writes “most Arab regimes belong to one of two categories: those that depend on the people’s loyalty and those that depend on their obedience. Loyalty may be ethnic, tribal, regional, or some combination of these… The regimes that depend on obedience are European-style dictatorships that use techniques of control and enforcement derived from the fascist and communist models. These regimes have little or no claim to the loyalty of their people and depend for survival on diversion and repression: directing the anger of their people toward some external enemy.”

The recent order has been the loyalty regimes like Morocco and Saudi Arabia or the obedience regimes like Egypt or Syria (I presume). But, he goes on to point out that these two models “are becoming less effective; there are groups, increasing in number and importance, that seek a new form of government based not primarily on loyalty, and still less on repression, but on consent and participation. These groups are still small and, of necessity, quiet, but the fact that they have appeared at all is a remarkable development.”

A trend for the future may be a move away from the either-or choice of loyalty versus obedience toward a third option of consent (democratic-like models). Lebanon, he states, “is one country in the entire region with a significant experience of democratic political life. It has suffered not for its faults but for its merits – the freedom and openness that others have exploited with devastating effect.”

This, to me, seems to suggest a first-mover disadvantage within the Arab world. The creation of a government modeled on consent necessarily creates a situation in which there is also freedom to openly oppose the government without fear of suppression or social chastisement, creating a situation amenable to not just political disagreement, but is also like sending an invitation to Hezbollah or al-Qaeda to come set up a recruiting center or a jihadist FOB (see Lebanon and Iraq).

Who wants to be first to open up if it means you trade your tyranny, which for whatever its sins at least ensured stability and security, only to get in return Hezbollah or the latest “al-Qaeda in (insert region)” franchise? This creates a paradox in which the only way to ensure your consent model of government is to rely upon the very secret police and oppressive arm of the government that you were hoping to get rid of. And what if they finally purge the foreign fighter? Can they be expected to just disband, as their rank and file smoothly transition into the private sector? Not likely.

Iraq seems to be the best hope for the region in transitioning to the consent model. But is OIF a blueprint for success? Operation Syrian Freedom doesn’t sound good. Operation West Bank Freedom? Sounds like an industrial meat grinder, wrapped in flypaper. How about sanctions against the bad regimes and foreign aid for the goods ones? How’s that working out for us?

Democracy may simply be a manifestation of a country's social evolution to a point where it is more resistant to the elements of a successful insurgency (rather than having any special tools to combat them after the fact). That the insurgencies were unsuccessful may be due to their failure to achieve certain decisive tasks, rather than the democracy's success in responding to the insurgencies. Democracy may be more akin to a preventive vaccination than to a post-diagnosis dose of antibiotics. But in some countries, like in the Mideast, it is like a flu vaccine - the vaccine brings risk in the early stages.