SIVACRACY.NET

Both authors come to a somewhat similar conclusion, though with differing levels of anger. Here's Ignatieff:

For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America's democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections.

But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ''community of democracies'' to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson's dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream. In the cold war, America was accepted as the leader of ''the free world.'' The free world -- the West -- has fractured, leaving a fierce and growing argument about democracy in its place.

And here's Judt:

...when foreigners look across the oceans at the US today, what they see is far from reassuring.

For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not "democracy."

I'm not entirely persuaded by either account. Judt's slipping the F-word (Fascism) in without using it strikes me as a bit troubling (we're a long, long way from Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy), though I share virtually each of the concerns he raises and am also aware of how dimly even some Japanese conservatives view America's weird psycho-religious trajectory. And Ignatieff, I think, slips when he writes:

It would be a noble thing if one day 26 million Iraqis could live their lives without fear in a country of their own. But it would also have been a noble dream if the South Vietnamese had been able to resist the armored divisions of North Vietnam and to maintain such freedom as they had. Lyndon Johnson said the reason Americans were there was the ''principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania,'' the right of people to choose their own path to change. Noble dream or not, the price turned out to be just too high.

I think he had better in 2003, when he wrote:

Just because Wilson and Roosevelt sent Americans to fight and die for freedom in Europe and Asia doesn't mean their successors are committed to this duty everywhere and forever. The war in Vietnam was sold to a skeptical American public as another battle for freedom, and it led the republic into defeat and disgrace.

Full disclosure: I have no problem in principle with the use of the American military to promote humanitarian outcomes, including democracy, and I certainly do not side with the view that "democracy can't be imposed at gunpoint." I have a lot of faith in guns. If the University of Wisconsin would let me, I would pack a 9 to class in order to ensure the students were actually doing the required reading. But for a ton of reasons -- including the country's ethnic/religious cleavages as well as its dependence on oil, which, as Michael Ross persuasively argues (note: in pdf format) has not historically been particularly helpful for democratization -- I felt Iraq was a poor choice for America to experiment. I also never bought the claims that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had any meaningful, operational connection.

Anyway, both articles -- by creative minds wrestling with an important question -- are well worth reading. They're certainly provocative for those of us who, having opposed the war to begin with, very much hope that it will somehow create a democratic, peaceful, and prosperous Iraq.