Democracy, a product that doesn't export well

The Americans - and to a lesser extent their Western allies - are no strangers to the curious exercise of exporting democracy to non-democratic countries by force of arms. A practice with rather mixed results.

Kosovo in 1999, Iraq in 2003, Operation «Odyssey Dawn» in Libya in 2011, and the war in Afghanistan: four typical examples of U.S.-Western interventionism. This interventionism, ideologically justified by the ideal of promoting the Western democratic model throughout the rest of the world, has all too often ended in serious failures, while revealing the less noble reasons that motivated it—and continue to motivate it—at the most fundamental level.

It wasn't for lack of people who sincerely believed in the civilizing mission of Western democracies, however: the famous neoconservatives, who