If we as Westerners have to ask why Iraqis are protesting in freedom's hallowed street we've not been paying attention to the consequences of Washington's violently engineered democracy.
Six years later, Albert Einstein gave the keynote address, saying that "engineers make democracy possible".
Mr. Wang, a former engineer, distributed pro-democracy writings using e-mail and Yahoo forums, often anonymously.
The assembly is due to write a new constitution as part of a transition to democracy engineered by the generals who took power after the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak's autocratic government last year.
Calvo Sotelo, who was left with the task of restoring confidence in democracy, successfully engineered Spain's entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATOO) in 1982.
For the neo-conservatives, no Arab country, after Iraq, represents such an obstacle to all they are trying to achieve, and in no other Arab country would American-engineered "regime change" and "democracy" have a more beneficial effect.
That something is the fact that -- having talked for years about Nigeria's need for democracy, having engineered many "transition programs" -- General Babangida annulled the presidential election of 1993, ushering Africa's most populous nation into a five-year nightmare under his former second-in-command, the late Gen. Sani Abacha.
And as my wife argued in a debate in which I expressed my doubts about Moussa's credentials, the Arab League chief and former foreign minister could well be the best candidate to engineer a stable transition to democracy.
Few events are as tantalizing as the Hungarian uprising, whose initial few days saw Soviet hesitation and a growing belief that Nagy, the prime minister, could engineer some form of pluralist democracy — Titoism-plus — even within the Communist orbit.
Many Americans concur that U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed any hope that democracy can be engineered from outside.
Even if Mr Putin restrains himself for now, he is sure to respond eventually: he nurtures grudges for years, and the Potemkin democracy he has engineered in Russia lets him stick around long enough to avenge them.
