Unfortunately, this appears to have been lost on the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, for whom it was the invasion of Iraq and its liberation from Saddam Hussein that was supposed to provide a beacon for a wave of democratization that would transform the Middle East. What they produced instead was an “electocracy” that, in the absence of liberal institutions, replaced the tyranny of the Sunni minority with a tyranny of the Shiite majority and a religious sectarian civil war.