Jonah Goldberg says that we should have installed liberalism in Iraq, not democracy. There is a confusion between the two, and as he points out, introducing democracy in an illiberal society will not necessarily provide helpful results.

…many on the left see no problem singing the praises of leftwing regimes which put “equality” ahead of democracy. As Derb once put it, “Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.” But regimes which put liberty and the rule of law ahead of democracy and the like are always immediately derided as dictatorial “strong-man” regimes. I’m not saying that such criticism isn’t sometimes accurate. After all, democracy is good and tends to innoculate against tyranny and without democracy enlightened regimes often go bad. But I would still have preferred to live under Pinochet than Castro or Lee Kuan Yew instead of Hugo Chavez (or, heh, the Hapsburgs than the Soviets).

As someone who still considers himself a classical liberal, that makes a lot of sense to me, given the often ugly choices of the real (as opposed to ivory-tower) world. It’s easy to overrate and overemphasize democracy. As Churchill once said, it’s the worst possible system, except for all the others.