Daniel Drezner points to this San Francisco Chronicle article about the Iraq experience of Larry Diamond, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institute who was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and a promoter of democratic principles in government. As Mr. Drezner’s post points out, Diamond is still a promoter of democracy, but is not optimistic about Iraq, primarily because of the United States’ failure to provide adequate security for the Iraqi people willing to risk commitment to democratic principles. As the Chronicle article notes:

We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We just weren’t honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country.”
“You can’t develop democracy without security,” he said. “In Iraq, it’s really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don’t get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that.”

Diamond relates that his realization of the deficiencies in the American security force came to him while speaking to a woman’s group in Baghdad:

“I had one of those moments when you cut through all the bull,” he said. “I was speaking to this women’s group, and one woman got up and asked, ‘If we do all these things, who’s going to protect us?’ ” Diamond recalled. “That was the moment when I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, some of these women are going to be assassinated because they are here listening to me.’ It just struck me between the eyes.”
As the violence spread, Diamond said, he felt ever more painfully the mistake the United States had made by not sending in more troops to keep the insurgents at bay.
The American policies basically encouraged Iraqis to stand up — only to face the threat of being mowed down for doing so, he said.
“It was totally hypocritical of us to do one and not the other,” Diamond said of the lack of security.

The entire article is interesting and thought provoking, so read it all.