Just watched Bush's press conference from yesterday, and one particular bit caught my attention. When asked about the prospects for peace in Iraq, Bush said:
Now, of course, the question is, will Iraq ever be free, and will it be peaceful? And I believe it will. I remind some of my friends that it took us a while to go from the Articles of Confederation to the United States Constitution. Even our own experiment with democracy didn't happen overnight. I never have expected Thomas Jefferson to emerge in Iraq in a 90-day period.
So first off, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which was published on July 4, 1776. He was around well before either the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution. Second, the Articles of Confederation were agreed to in November, 1777 and ratified in 1781. Third, the Constitution was signed in September 1787. The Revolutionary War ended in April 1783. (See, kids? Dates are important.) All this information is available on-line, for those (like me) whose American History might be a little shaky.
So here's my follow-up question. If we're using U.S. history as the baseline, and we assume that present-day Iraq is roughly where the U.S. was in it's pre-Articles of Confederation period, does that mean that we can expect to be in Iraq for roughly a decade before a functioning democracy appears? And further, if it took the U.S. a decade to reach that point with a Thomas Jefferson at hand, what should we reasonably expect from Iraq, which apparently has no such figure (yet)?
Posted by Jason at July 31, 2003 09:53 AM