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Switzerland has had its share of ethnic tension. In fact, there was a civil war in that country in the 1840s, representing a Protestant-Catholic conflict. Until the early 20th Century, the Jesuits were banned from several Protestant cantons. As recently as 1979, the French speaking area of Jura seceded from the canton of Bern, which is predominantly German, to form its own canton.

There are two reasons Switzerland has held together. The first is the respect for the sovereignty of the individual cantons, which tend to be dominated by one of the four major ethnic groups: German, French, Italian, and Romansch, in the Swiss Constitution. The Swiss Constitution's preamble indicates that both the people and the cantons form the government, unlike the U.S. Constitution, which refers to "we the people." Citizenship in Switzerland is defined as inuring from one's status as a citizen of the canton, whereas our 14th Amendment defines American citizenship as deriving from being born or naturalized in the United States. As a practical matter, the Swiss cantons exercise at least as much, if not more, self-government as do the American states. Ethnic self-government in a context of generally limited government seems to be a major element in the continued existence of Switzerland. Socialistic regimes, where different nationalities fight over state-distributed benefits, tend to inflame ethnic conflicts. Many Flemings and Walloons want to divide Belgium, and similar sentiments are held by Englishmen and Scotsmen in Britain, and English Canadians and French Canadians to our north. The tensions and calls for independence have increased since these nations have moved in the direction of a welfare state and a socialistic economy.

The second element is the fact that the four national groups and two major religious groups of Switzerland share the common heritage of the Christian religion and Western civilization. Modern day Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, is strongly respective of the right to freedom of conscience and the worth of the individual, and Western civilization, as far back as Ancient Greece, has emphasized both the rights and the duties of the individual. Despite its Nazi period, West Germany had enough of the underlying Western values to permit establishment of a representative government in relatively short order. We are witnessing a reasonable return to a civil society and representative government in nations like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic despite 40 years under the Communist jackboot. Even in Japan, the powers that be were strongly admiring of the West, and after World War II, reconstructed the society after the American model, rather than the Prussian model favored by the militarists who dominated the Japanese government in the 1930s.

This crucial elements of Western civilization and the Christian religion are entirely lacking in Iraq. Have you not noticed that there is only one stable democracy between Greece and India? Israel is the also the only non-Muslim nation in the region, and has strong historic ties with Western civilization. Turkey, the most Westernized of the Middle Eastern nations, is the least objectionable from a standpoint of personal freedom, due ironically to the influence of Kemal Ataturk, a secular strongman who ran that nation for several decades. But the Turks have had several military coups, a strong faction supporting establishment of sharia law, and a restive Kurdish minority. Lebanon had a representative government and a civil society when it had a Christian majority. That majority is long gone, and that nation has become a satellite of Syria.

It is unrealistic, and reeking of Wilsonian idealism, to assume that all you have to do is declare a democracy is in place, and expect people to abandon their religious beliefs and culture that are inherently inimical to human rights and liberty of conscience. Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations have had two main factions: a secular faction, like the Ba'athists, whose ideology is a combination of fascist and Marxist principles, and the Islamic militants, both Sunni and Shia, who want an authoritarian theocracy. To expect such people to have some sort of yearning for democracy is as realistic as thinking you can grow bananas in Alaska outside of a hothouse.

Anyone who ignores these facts and insists on the continued pursuit of an unsuccessful policy in the administration of post-Saddam Iraq is indeed ignorant of both history and reality, Wakeyboy.