I haven’t followed the nuances of Richard Perle’s thought as well as I should. As far as I can tell, though, Perle tends to be too optimistic about the difficult task of bringing democracy to the Arab world. An article by Christopher Lee in today’s Washington Post quotes Perle saying that, if Iraqis choose to create an Islamic theocracy, the United States will just have to live with that choice. This seems to me to get things exactly wrong. An elected Islamic theocracy would not be a democracy at all. I’ve argued in, “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint,” that real democracy takes time to establish, and cannot be defined merely be the presence of elections. Perle, I suspect, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants quick democracy in Iraq, and is willing to risk an Islamist dictatorship to get it. I can’t think of a clearer example of what I’ve been arguing against.