WELL: Kevin Yaroch establishes, entirely correctly, that I left out, oh, part of the conclusion and most of the premises in discussing how this particular post suggests the superiority of republican forms over government over democratic alternatives.
Essentially, it looks like the people of Iraq are not hostile to liberal democratic values as such, but it's unclear exactly how much support they have for a government that models western values. This isn't so much because they dislike western-style democracy as the concepts involved are a little fuzzy for them. The beauty of the republican form of government is its quasi-aristocratic status: that is, so long as there are enough people who get what's going on to run the country, then it really doesn't matter where the vast majority of people are at any one time. This was, as I understand it, the organizational principle under which our country flourished prior to Andrew Jackson.
Why a republican form? Because it can run roughshod over people's expressed non-western preferences until such a time as it becomes sufficiently obvious that there's a connection between a western-style government and the sorts of things they value (like free elections, civil liberties, what have you), at which point people's preferences will align with their interests, with positive pro-liberal democratic results somewhere off in the future.
If you start with democracy instead, then you have people's interests and preferences crosscutting, and you have it happening in a world where the is no stable elite (meritocratic or otherwise) to anchor factions, which seems to be a perfect recipe for chaos.
Hopefully that makes a little more sense. Hopefully.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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