The Failure of Democratic Peace

The closest thing we have to a "law" in the social sciences, or at least political science, is that democracies do not fight each other. There are a few minor caveats, but generally this holds true from the beginning of democracy up to the present. This is part of the core of Neo-Conservative beliefs that led U.S. officials to engage in state building in Iraq. Just because we toppled Hussein's regime didn't mean we were obligated to establish a new one. But many of our policy makers, both then and now, place their faith in the dictum that democracies don't fight each other.
The reason this is so appealling, and worth the enormous price we've paid in lives, dollars and reputation, at least in the eyes of some, is that with a democracy in the middle east, especially a large and relatively wealthy country like Iraq, the West could get a foot hold and begin to exercise more control in more peaceful ways in order to acheive more peaceful outcomes. Sounds like an optimal solution, right?
Wrong. First of all they were hundreds of billions of dollars off in their pre-war cost estimates, and they thought the "body count" would resemble that in the first Gulf War in 1992. Second, they assumed that once they had a democracy established it would flourish and peace would begin to break out all over the middle east. One of the caveats to the democracies-never-fight-rule is that they have to be established democracies. This suggests that there must be fair and open elections with wide participation (we're ok there, not great), low levels of corruption (this one's a bit shaky but not a deal break in and of itself), and no or amost no political instability. State building, when it has been a successful venture in the past, which has not been often, has been a long and expensive process. It requires reshaping the thinking of an entire society. It more than convincing the people that voting is good and they need to do it. They have to gain faith in the system, trust that things can be handled legally in the courts. They have to understand how the system works and how they can address greivances peacefully.
In short, political stability does not exist in Iraq, nor is there any sign of it in the near future. The violence decreases when we have tens of thousands of troops on the ground and we're pumping billions of dollars into the country, but democracy has not yet taken root. It will likely be a long time and hundreds of billions of dollars down the road before it does. And only then can we hope that democracy might spread peacefully to other states in the region.