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This is the key point in re-evaluating Iraq War strategy. At the time, the notion of planting the seed of democracy to undermine militant extremism in the region seemed reasonable - possibly even the only logical way to defeat the stated "enemy" of "terrorism."
But the planners of that war - not just Bush and his administration per se, but the permanent foreign service bureaucracy that predated them - were so horribly wrong about the composition of the soil they were planting that seed of democracy in.
In a way, they were committing the fallacy of Chesterton's fence: they tore something down without understanding why it was there in the first place. It's an easier mistake to make when the fence you're tearing down is covered with bloody razor wire.
Belief in the transformative power of democracy was widespread in the 90s and 2000s. It never faded entirely. Obama's absurd misreading of the "Arab Spring" was born from the same assumptions as nation-building in Iraq. So is the belief that refugees will adopt Western values.
The central mistake is believing that "democracy" can flourish without creating the conditions that sustain it - that democracy will transform a society rather than being transformed by the social forces in place, some of them dating back centuries.
Once we stop making that mistake, it would become easier to coldly evaluate a dictatorship and more accurately predict what will happen after the dictator is removed, and how much effort it would take to meaningfully control that outcome. /end
