Now that the Bush administration has won the shooting war in Iraq, it has begun the far more challenging mission of transforming a brutal tyranny into a democracy, and then lighting the fire of political reform throughout the entire Middle East.

Numerous experts describe the campaign as among the most ambitious political experiments ever attempted. Many insist it is dangerous folly.

"Democracy has emerged at times where it had never existed before," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who has written extensively on the spread of democratic movements. "But Iraq lacks virtually every possible precondition for democracy. And the possibilities in the other Arab countries may be even lower."

He said, for instance, there's not a large, entrepreneurial middle class, almost no experience with free elections and neither a free press nor an open economy practically anywhere in the region.

Murhaf Jouejati, adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington,

said it was obvious that most Iraqis were thrilled at throwing off the yoke of oppression, but that the looting and chaos that has followed provide an ominous sign of the kinds of violent forces the war has unleashed, and how hard it will be to contain them.

"There has not been a single day of democracy in Iraq in its history," he said. "It is still a tribal and clan-oriented society. Democracy needs a social infrastructure that does not exist at all in Iraq, or elsewhere in the region."

Nevertheless, President Bush and administration officials have stated repeatedly that their aim was not only to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein, but also to leave behind a robust democratic government and an open society along American lines.

That will be just the seed, they have argued, for a flowering of democracies throughout the Arab world.

But the region consists of dictatorships and monarchies where -- aside from a brief flirtation with political pluralism in Lebanon years ago -- no successful democracy has ever taken root. And now it is seething with resentment against America for what many Arabs perceive as a colonialistic intervention in Iraq -- a view shared even by some friendly Arab governments.

INTERNAL PRESSURE

Judith Kipper, the director of the Middle East Forum at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said that there was, in fact, growing pressure for change in the region, largely from the exploding numbers of frustrated young Arabs with few prospects of good jobs or the kind of education that could provide one. Experience has shown, though, that this has never translated into a yearning for a Jeffersonian upheaval, she said.

"There is a real craving for something better -- to have jobs, entertainment, education," she said. "But they don't want Western-style democracies. Absolutely not. We should get it out of our heads that their societies are going to start looking like us."

David Ransom, a diplomat who spent his career in the Middle East and was U. S. ambassador to Bahrain during the Clinton administration, said that open elections, if they could actually be staged, might produce even grimmer results, because many alienated Arabs would choose fundamentalist regimes if given a chance.

"I firmly believe that even if we could get democracies there, we aren't going to like the results," said Ransom, now a scholar at the Middle East Institute. "I spent 30 years looking for grassroots democratic movements in the Middle East and I didn't find any."

Added Diamond, "This is going to be a long hard struggle. Nothing will go quickly."

Even some Bush administration supporters have raised serious questions about the prospects for democracy, and the extent of American tolerance.

"I'm a skeptic about the ability to transform Iraq into a democracy in any realistic period of time," Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under President Bush's father, said in a recent speech to the Norwegian Nobel Institute. He stressed the lack of functioning civic institutions and the bitter divisions among Iraqi religious and ethnic groups as obstacles to any sort of political pluralism.

"What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win?" Scowcroft asked. "What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over."

THREATENING THE STATUS QUO

Even some of America's staunchest Arab allies have bridled, because their own monopoly on power might be threatened by a push toward U.S.-style free elections and thriving political opposition.

"The idea of imposing democracy from outside is not supported by Egypt or any Arab country," said Osama el Baz, a top adviser to President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid.

THE ASIAN EXAMPLE

Bush has responded to the skeptics by pointing to America's success half a century ago in nurturing democracy among its World War II foes, Japan, Germany and Italy. And one of the administration's principal ideologues, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, has compared the Middle East to East Asia,

where a sort of reverse domino theory took hold after the Vietnam War, spreading democracy rather than communism.

"It's very important for people to understand this idea that Arabs are not capable of democracy is nonsense," Wolfowitz said on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. "I remember hearing that Koreans weren't capable of democracy, and that was a myth you heard for a long time. The Koreans have demonstrated they can do it. Many people have done it in the latter part of the 20th century. It's time for the Arabs to do it now."

But many experts say the analogy with Asia, which has grown over the past half-century from one of the most despotic to one of the most democratized regions in the world, undermines rather than supports the administration's arguments.

Catharin Dalpino, an Asia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington,

said that before democracy took root in East Asia, a solid foundation had been established: there was an educated middle class in each country, generally open economies reliant on trade, growing prosperity, a lively press and some experience with free elections and pluralism, at least at a local level. Each country had a generally able civil service, too.

Importantly, she added, the movements took years to develop.

"We have this belief now in a pop-up democracy," said Dalpino. "We think the fall of the Berlin Wall is the model all the other countries will follow, that democracy is just waiting to happen once you remove all the things that get in the way. It requires special conditions, and even then there are different kinds of democracies that we may not like."

Diamond said that Iraq lacked nearly all the qualities that made most Asian countries fertile ground for democratic development: Illiteracy among adults is now estimated at more than 40 percent; the Iraqi population is young, with some 40 percent under age 15, but joblessness, even before the war, was pervasive; the middle class has lost its buying power and seen its lifestyle eroded; the economy, which is all but closed to foreign trade, is wholly reliant on oil income, with no entrepreneurial class.

A CONTROLLED ECONOMY

In fact, Ransom said, throughout the oil states of the Middle East, and especially in Iraq, the economies are even more firmly state-controlled than were the old Soviet-bloc nations during the Cold War, stifling investment and entrepreneurs.

"The truth is almost anything you did in Iraq would be better than what they had," said Shibley Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "But going from that to talking about democracy presents a lot of challenges. Nothing is impossible, but it doesn't seem likely to me. There is so little to open the way."

David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, in Washington, said that even in the most recent Asian success story, China, the economy has been transformed by capitalist innovations, while the government has maintained a rigid, one-party communist political system.

The Chinese Communist Party devised a model in the 1980s that opened portions of the economy to foreign investment and trade, which eventually created an explosive boom and enormous wealth. The Beijing government has used prosperity as a means of staving off demands for greater political openness, but Bush has rejected that approach because of his insistence on democratic change.

LOOKING TO IRAN

To some supporters of the Bush plan, if not the president himself, Iran demonstrates the desire for reform and change in the region. A nascent reform movement, led in large part by students frustrated by government oppression and a lack of economic opportunity, has gained momentum over the past few years, with occasional outbreaks of civil unrest in opposition to the ruling mullahs.

But experts also say this is a poor model, too, in part because of the slow evolutionary pace of change -- in contrast to Bush's whirlwind campaign in Iraq. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran and a strong supporter of democratic reform, said there are clear signs of a grassroots movement in Iran, and that American intervention would probably hurt, not help.

"It would backfire if it were too overt," he said. "This has to happen through the Iranian people themselves or it could reverse."

Mostly Shiite Iran is also far more homogeneous than Iraq, which is bitterly divided along ethnic and religious lines. Ransom compared Iraq with Northern Ireland, except there are three feuding groups -- the Kurds, the Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslims -- rather than two.

"In the long term, I think if despite everything you developed a model that inspired public confidence, then there is a possibility," said Telhami. "But the long term is nothing but a series of short terms. When you light a fire, you don't know where it will spread and whose house it will burn down."

ALGERIA: Multiparty state with elected parliament and president. The National Liberation Front, the dominant party since independence from France 40 years ago, won the 2002 parliamentary elections, which were marred by violence. In 1991, fearing the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front would be elected, the army aborted the final round of elections, which sparked a bloody insurgency.

BAHRAIN: Became a constitutional monarchy in 2002 as part of reforms that paved the way for the first legislative elections in 30 years. Women voted and ran in the October election, which secularists narrowly won. Most power still resides with Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

EGYPT: President Hosni Mubarak's security apparatus and National Democratic Party have almost absolute control over the elected parliament. Mubarak periodically stands as the sole presidential candidate in referendums in which voters can choose yes or no. These always produce an overwhelming yes vote.

JORDAN: King Abdullah II has virtually absolute power. An elected parliament has not met since 2001, although Abdullah promises parliamentary elections later this year. KUWAIT: Politics are controlled by Emir Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah and his family. Kuwait pioneered among Arabs in electing a parliament, in 1963, but the emir regularly dismisses national assemblies. Women are barred from voting or running for office.

LEBANON: Elections are regular and lively, but are circumscribed by a power- sharing agreement meant to prevent a resurgence of the 1975-90 sectarian civil war. Legislative seats are apportioned equally to Christians and Muslims. The prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and the president a Christian. Syria wields great influence over Lebanese politics.

LIBYA: Moammar Khadafy has held absolute power since a 1969 military coup.

MOROCCO: King Mohammed VI appoints the prime minister and members of the government following legislative elections. He can fire any minister, dissolve parliament, call for new elections or rule by decree. Parliamentary elections held in September were praised as clean and fair. The Socialist Party won a majority of seats, but conservative Islamic parties did well.

OMAN: Sultan Qaboos became chief of state by overthrowing his father in 1970. His family has ruled for about 250 years. There are no political parties or elected legislature.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY: President Yasser Arafat is under growing pressure to share power after four decades of sole control. The post of Palestinian prime minister was recently created.

QATAR: Expected to have parliamentary elections in two or three years. It held the first municipal elections in 1999, with women fully participating. Al- Jazeera satellite TV station, the freest network in the Arab world, is based in Qatar.

SAUDI ARABIA: Crown Prince Abdullah rules on behalf of ailing King Fahd. There is no elected legislature. The royal family is under pressure to reform. The government recently allowed international rights monitors to visit for the first time, and Abdullah proposed that Arab states encourage broader political participation.

SYRIA: President Bashar Assad wields near-absolute power, disappointing those who had hoped the young, Western-educated physician would open up politics after taking over in 2000.

SUDAN: President Omar el-Bashir has been in power since a 1989 coup. Recently he moved to lessen the influence of fundamentalist Islamic leaders, but democratic reform is not on the agenda.

TUNISIA: A republic dominated by a single party, the Constitutional Democratic Assembly, since independence from France in 1956. Opposition parties have been allowed since 1981.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: Federation of states, each controlled by its own emir and family. YEMEN: President Ali Abdullah Saleh presides over largely feudal society. Although it has a constitution, an elected parliament and a lively press, power rests with the military and tribes.

Source: Associated Press

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

###