Mark Steyn explains why those ”realists” who believe that Iraq can’t be a democracy are wrong. One big reason is that Iraq is already the most economically advanced Arab nation.
In Europe, the wise old foreign-policy “realists” scoff at the Iraq elections  Islam and democracy are completely incompatible, old boy; everybody knows that, except these naive blundering Yanks who just don’t have our experience.
If that’s true, it’s a problem not for Iraq but, given current demographic trends, for France and Belgium and the Netherlands a year or two down the line.
But it happens to be untrue. The Afghan election worked so well that, there being insufficient bad news out of it, the Western media’s doom-mongers pretended it never happened. They’ll have a harder job doing that with Iraq, so instead they’ll have to play up every roadside bomb and every dead poll worker. But it won’t alter the basic reality: that the election may be imperfect but more than good enough.
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Naysayers in the Democratic Party and the U.S. media are so obsessed with Donald Rumsfeld getting this wrong and Condoleezza Rice getting that wrong and President Bush getting everything wrong that they’ve failed to notice just how surefooted both the Kurds and Shi’ites have been  which in the end is far more important.
The Shi’ites, for example, have adopted a moderate secular pitch entirely different from their co-religionist mullahs over the border. In fact, as partisan pols go, they sound a lot less loopy than, say, Barbara Boxer.
Even on the Sunni side of the street, there are signs the smarter fellows understand their plans to destroy the election have flopped and it’s time to cut themselves into the picture. The International Monetary Fund noted in November that the Iraqi economy is already outperforming all its Arab neighbors.
