[S.T.D.]

If you read nothing else this month read this:

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/viewM...ID/8/prmID/268

One of the best concise essays on the viability of exporting democracy you will ever read. Ever the polymath Jacques Barzun at the top of his game.

[Lillie_Steins]

... "democracy" means: it is a system of the government where most of the officials are elected by the citizens in free and unobsructed elections.

Catastrophic!
So the ideology of "democracy" is nothing more than a theory.
"Electing most of the officials by citizens" does not qualify the government as being democratic when the choice is limited to a handful of lobby-ized parties, whose differences are marginal at best, whose leading clique is not really bound to what they have promised once, when the actual "democratically" elected government does not have to ask their citizens within long periods of time if they still act with the citizens' legitimation.
Democracy only goes so far.
All those buzzwords they use need definitions with new buzzwords whose interpretation lies in the eye of the "public opinion" which is so easy to manipulate in these times of newspapers, TV and internet.
Do you think the US is democratic? I mean really democratic? Or any other nation?