Clearly, people in Iraq occasionally cast votes, and the ballots determine things like who sits in the Prime Minister's office in Baghdad. But it seems to me that democracy requires something more than this. If the security forces that run the country have greater allegiances to unelected leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr than to their elected leaders, it's not a democracy. We could argue about whether political power everywhere grows from the barrel of a gun, but it certainly does in Iraq. And if the way the barrels of the country's guns are pointed is determined more by Muqtada's wishes than those of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Parliament, and other legitimately elected representatives of the Iraqi public, we haven't brought democracy to the country.
