Iraq is way too soon to tell, but it seems the western form of government they are trying to adopt is beginning to work for them.

I am curious as to what you base this on. I realize you have a major disclaimer at the beginning of the statement, but I am really disheartened by the state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems to me we have propped up the facade of a “western form of government” in both countries. I think they are going through the motions because the US is the virtual equivalent of the current warlord in power. So they do it our way until another warlord is in power, which will probably be in fairly short order after we pull out.

You should have seen the Iraqis on Election Day in January of 2005.  That was the day when I knew we were doing the right thing there.  I was NCOIC of a patrol pulling security outside a polling place in a little town called Al-Alam outside of Tikrit when several of the local clan chiefs/sheiks (some of whom had insurgents within their clan) came up and thanked me and my soldiers for putting our lives at risk so they could have a real government.  That convinced me that we would eventually be successful.  The Iraqi government is not like the American and nor should we expect it to be.  Their political system works but very differently from ours.  It is significant that right now they are arguing about how to form a coalition but not shooting at each other.  The ones doing the shooting and bombing in Iraq right now are the ones who oppose any type of political process that smacks of democracy.  Never forget that Islamic Radicals are just as hostile to true democracy as the communists ever were.  They might even be worse, because they are convinced that they have God on their side.We will not know if the Democracy project has worked in Iraq for 15-20 years at least, just like we did not know if it worked with Germany and Japan for a couple of decades after WWII.  In the real world things often don?t happen as fast as we would like and the American public has been conditioned to think that long-term is after the next Congressional Elections not a decade or two down the road.

I think the fact that Iraq has not degraded into all out civil war over the current parliamentary impasse is an extremely positive sign.  it demonstrates that the average Iraqi man on the street has confidence in the current government and that the problems will eventually be worked out.  I trust their judgement more than that of any pundit.  Iraq is on the right path, we just have to give them time to mature, I think eventually they will be as stable as both Germany and Japan.  It may take longer but they will get there.  That prospect, that they might succeed, actually scares the extremeists more than the thought of US power because it means the extremists are politically as well as morally bankrupt.

The Oldest Insurgency/Counterinsurgency against a world power I can think of was in the 330s B.C. between the Macedonians and Bactrians in what is present day Afghanistan.  It is the only place where Alexander could not establish firm rule.  He chased the Bactrians for several years and finally threw up his hands and moved on to India.