Funny, the U.S. government already tried promoting a neo-liberal society in Iraq — it was the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.

Google “Rummy and Saddam” and you’ll pull up photos documenting that Saddam was our guy on the U.S. payroll for over a decade.

Iraq under Hussein was reviled by most of the Arab world precisely because Saddam kept the Islamic radicals in check. And while he was no democrat, under the Baathist regime women were not being murdered for holding a professional job or for wearing wetsern style fashions. The tribal chiefs with their various interpretations of Sharia law were not allowed to usurp central state power.

Iraq’s ongoing slide into full civil war can be seen as the rise of the decentralized chiefs and their militias to contest a power vacuum created by a powerless central government that is sequestered inside the Green Zone.

Perhaps the way the war is playing out sheds new light on the logic of Hussein’s brutal suppression of religious factionalism in a country with a thousand year history of tribal blood-letting.

What is likely to transpire in Iraq is not a liberal democracy, but a loosely-federated collection of Islamic theocracies with closer ties to Iran and Syria and a weak unity among themselves based on resisting an American presence in Iraq.

I guess there’s not much hope that, as Rummy predicted, we’ll one day (maybe after the next or the next “mission accomplished”) still be greeted as liberators?