Occam’s Toothbrush points us to this Jerusalem Post interview with Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, America’s preeminent expert on Middle East affairs (author of “What Went Wrong“), in which Professor Lewis comments on the present situation in Iraq:

Are you in favor of immediate elections in Iraq?
I don’t want us to repeat what happened in Algeria, where elections quickly devolved into a massacre. We need to tread very carefully. Elections have to stabilize Iraq, not upset it. Otherwise, countries like Iran and other Middle Eastern dictatorships have an interest in seeing to it that democracy never takes root. Much of the funding and organizational support for terrorist groups comes from Iran.
Do you have faith that, in spite of everything, democracy will prevail?
Saddam Hussein, a Ba’athist-minority dictator, was nourished by Nazism first and then by communism, both European totalitarian ideologies. If anything, the risk of not succeeding in dismantling these fragile Middle Eastern dictatorships today lies more in the history of the rapport between the Muslim and the Western worlds than it does in Muslim roots. Islam, which has been weak for two centuries, has always sought backing to help it fight the enemy – Western democracy. First it supported the Axis against the Allies, then the communists against the US: two disasters. Today it is seeking the protection of Europe against the US, which it sees as its principal enemy. And Europe is facing a difficult debate between those who want to accept that role and those who don’t. Please, I have no intention of comparing Europe to Nazi Germany or the USSR, I’m only talking about the position in which the Arab world is trying to put the old continent.