Ha! Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the rough road to democracy:
The fact that Iraq will have a democratic constitution that honors women’s rights, the rights of minorities, is going to be an important change in the broader Middle East. So says the President of the United States. But let’s take this analogy seriously. Iraq is maybe going through something like its Articles of Confederation stage — you’ve got your Whiskey Rebellion, your disorder, your confusion, etc.
But in a few years, they sort things out and the elite members of the nation’s dominant ethno-sectarian group will work out an agreement establishing order throughout the country. The Sunnis, naturally, will be held as chattel slaves. Kurdish land and natural resources will be slowly expropriated via a series of genocidal military campaigns.
Some decades down the road, the conflicts papered-over in the initial constitutional compromise will break out into the open leading to a horribly destructive Civil War.