French President Jacques Chirac, always eager to make a buck off of a mass murderer, on asserting democracy:

There is no ready-made formula for democracy readily transposable from one country to another. Democracy is not a method, it is a culture. For democracy to take root solidly and durably in the Arab world, it must be an Arab democracy before all else.

History is either irrelevant or inconvenient to Chirac's Politique Arabe de France, the Gallic art of doing business with strongmen. As an Iranian caller to Rush Limbaugh's program once observed, "Europe invests in governments; so in the Near East, they invest in dictators. America invests in people, and they do that by freeing them." In response to the amoral excuse for keeping entire nations in chains, the claim that democracy can't be established by instruction, Germany and Japan — two of the world's most dangerous fascist states before being beaten and societally reshaped by America to become two of the world's strongest democracies — ably disprove.