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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> Any citations for this notion?

I don't recall if Why Nations Fail specifically covered democracy, but at the very least, you can definitely see why nations caught in the vicious cycles it outlines might suffer more because of democracy.

> because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests

No. The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military. That's the big thing of what went so horribly wrong in Iraq: the US kept pushing military solution after military solution to fix very-non-military problems and was confused as to why it didn't work.

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> The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military.

If you look at U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt, CIA, military) over history, one consistent goal is to install regimes that are friendly to the U.S. and to topple regimes which are not. Defeating the military of the hostile regime can be part of that. But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

The U.S. generally sticks around and tries to install a replacement, often undemocratically. On the occasion that they do implement democratic elections, any winner that is not sufficiently friendly to U.S. interests is undermined or even couped and a (usually right-wing) government is installed undemocratically.

Occasionally the U.S. will even undermine the democratic government of a country it hasn't even officially militarily engaged with, because the leader is threatening U.S. business interests. The history of U.S. relations with Latin America is littered with this type of illegal covert warfare, most recently in Bolivia with Evo Morales who was nationalizing natural resources that U.S. business wanted access to.

> But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

That is exactly what the US military planned with Iraq, Rumsfeld had outlawed any talk of Phase IV (nation building). The generals wanted out of there as quick as possible because they knew it would be a clusterfk regardless of Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney thinking State, USAid and the UN would just manage Chalabi’s flowering democracy.

Of course, that fantasy lasted as long as it to blow up the UN HQ in Baghdad.

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