I always had a sneaking admiration for Josip Broz, better known as "Marshal Tito", of Yugoslavia ― probably because, according to his biography, the man had learned to speak Esperanto while in prison. This does not, of course, mean that he was one of the world's great paragons of democracy. Tito gave lip service to democracy ― lots of countries do; if election booths meant democracy, China, not India, would be known as the "world's largest democracy" ― but he seems to have seen it, as many others do, as an opportunity for a nation to make errors, where "error" is defined as "taking some route with which I disagree".
Yugoslavia, the erstwhile "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes", was an artificial construct, created out of the ruins of Austria-Hungary after World War I by the victorious Western powers, primarily, it seems, as a means of rewarding sometime ally Serbia, whose autocratic king became the king of this hodge-podge of ethnic groups ― which King Alexander more or less unilaterally decided made up a single unitary people, the "South Slavs", in whose honor he later rebaptized his kingdom as "Yugoslavia". After World War II, Tito, who led one of the two major anti-Nazi partisan groups in the kingdom, took over the country, called it "socialist", and ruled it with a relatively iron fist for a third of a century.
When Tito died in 1980 and the country passed under collective leadership, there were those ready to shout "democracy at last!" Things went along fairly well for another decade, until an opportunistic politician with Tito's ambitions but not his competence decided to run the country to suit himself. The result? That part of the Balkans has gone back to being the patchwork quilt it was before World War I, with Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians all running their own shows, Montenegrins talking about doing so after next year, and Kosovar Albanians effectively running theirs; we have yet to hear from the Magyar minority in Vojevodina, but I don't expect the silence to last.
Why talk about Yugoslavia now? Because I see a very lovely parallel developing in Iraq. Iraq, like Yugoslavia, was created out of quite disparate bits and pieces shortly after World War I. The borders of modern Iraq were drawn to include Shi'ite Basra, Sunni Baghdad and Kurdish Mosul, though to some extent the British were here simply following the pattern laid down by their Ottoman predecessors. A royal government was installed which lasted, in one form or another, until the rebellion of 1958. In 1979 Saddam Hussein became ruler of Iraq, somewhat in the vein of Tito, though Hussein had an unfortunate propensity, that Tito lacked, to engage in foreign military adventures (Iran, Kuwait). And now, one-man rule is gone and democracy rules supreme. Right?
So the question is, where will Iraq be ten years from now. Will it be a thriving Middle-Eastern counterweight to pressures from Iran? Or will it be broken up, like Yugoslavia, into its components ― Shi'ite Basra, Sunni Baghdad, Kurdish Mosul?