It is of course impossible for any country to export democracy to the Middle East, whose societies have no history of democratic institutions and whose people lack a tradition of public civility and restraint. The reasons why we persist in trying to do so include self-delusion; national grandiosity, self-importance, moral superiority, and arrogance; want of knowledge of history combined with ideological thinking that feeds millennial illusions; the lust for global political and economic power; the military-industrial complex decried by President Eisenhower; the anti-republican conviction that the United States must always be “doing something” in the world; and concern for imperial show and international publicity and a fixation with global public relations.

Chilton Williamson Jr., "Has Democracy Died?"