At the risk of getting into Boring Politics....

...I would like to share an interesting excerpt from the book that I am reading, "Eastward to Tartary":

"Zhelyu Zhelev, Bulgaria's first post-Communist president and the author of a 1982 dissident work, 'What is Fascism?', told me that a totalitarian state should normally be followed by a military regime, as in Spain...which set the stage for a peaceful, relatively civil, and slow transition to democracy....New democracies, weak and lacking institutions, created power vacuums filled by organized crime"

I find this to be a very interesting, and perceptive look into how to successfully transition a communist state into a Democratic state. I believe he makes sense in his accusations, as those nations that quickly turn to democracies end up at the whim of the ex-Communist elite, who use their wealth to manipulate a free political system through bribery to get their way in government. This probably explains the difficulty that many nations have gone under in their transition to a democracy. The freedom of democracy can be very easily abused by those who do not understand it. Think about the transition of Japan from an Empire to a democracy today. The heavy involvement of the US military in the post WWII years has ended up working the best for the nation in the end, since it is the second largest economy in the world, behind the US. In fact, Germany is the third largest, which makes it quite coincidental that the two major axis during WWII, with US help, ended up as two of the most economically powerful nations on the earth today.

This is not to laud the United States in any means, but one cannot deny that the US's military involvement in these nations' 'transitions' into democracy has indeed turn them into major powers in the world. did the Administration go into Iraq thinking the same thing? Then again there were a few failures, Vietnam, Kosovo. The future of Iraq will be something very interesting to witness, and if the United States is successful in turning Iraq into something even remotely close to Germany or Japan, those Bush-haters (including me) are going to have to rethink their attitudes towards one of the least popular presidents in history.

Feedback would no doubt be appreciated on this subject, if I haven't already bored the hell outta those who read this =)