The new Military (Ret.) Governor of Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), convened a leadership meeting in Nasariyya today with whatever Iraqi opposition groups he could get to come. He pooh-poohed the idea that democracy was unlikely to flower in postwar Iraq.

“I don't think they had a love-in when they had [the 1787 Constitutional Convention in] Philadelphia,” he told the New York Times. I had forgotten the time when Alexander Hamilton’s followers hacked Richard Dobbs Spaight to death, or when partisans of James McHenry mobbed Thomas Jefferson’s house, threatening to kill him unless he left the country within 24 hours.

“Anytime you start the process it's fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be,” says the Military (Ret.) Governor. Dialogue and tensions, sure. But did he really just say the birth of the democratic tradition in Iraq should be fraught with coercion?