When Larry Diamond left for Baghdad in January as an adviser to the U.S. occupation authority, he took all the equipment he believed he needed to help construct a hopeful new nation out of the ashes of dictatorship: the academic models he had crafted over the years as an authority on building democracies, and confidence those models would work.

But the jarring reality of Iraq, with its escalating violence and collapsing civic order, forced Diamond to look for a few new tools beyond those listed in the textbooks. When he speaks now of the models for building democratic countries, he stresses a different set of equipment, which he found in short supply: body armor, armor-plated cars, a huge military presence.

The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities.

"We just bungled this so badly," said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country."

Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq -- lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind.

Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane.

Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration's unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents.

"You can't develop democracy without security," he said. "In Iraq, it's really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don't get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that."

Few people would seem better prepared for the job in Iraq than Diamond. He is coordinator of the Democracy Program at Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and he has been co-editor since 1990 of the Journal of Democracy. He has done extensive fieldwork in Taiwan and Nigeria.

He said he had initially opposed the war in Iraq because he felt the United States needed broader international support before attacking, but after the main ground fighting ended last April, he was ready to help.

"Once the war was over, I felt we had a moral and political obligation to the Iraqis to try and help build something better," he said. "That was clear in my mind. I didn't agonize over that. I really had something to contribute."

So late last year, after the Bush administration and the provisional authority outlined their plans for writing an interim constitution and handing over sovereignty on June 30, Diamond said he began to speak with officials about playing a role and implementing some of the ideas he had spent his career developing.

Arriving in Baghdad in early January, he said, he was sober-minded about the challenges but encouraged by much of what he found.

"When I got there on the ground, I was actually hopeful as I met some of the young people, women, civic groups, and their eagerness for change," he said.

"It was mind-blowing, really,'' he added. "There were people who wanted to know how to make democracy work. There were so many positive signs. Civil society was very weak, as you'd expect, but it was beginning to reconstitute itself. There was a lot of energy, a lot of passion, a lot of creativity and a lot of desire to learn. I even had a good experience with some mullahs who supported us."

Diamond said that he had some successes. He said he sought to provide female representatives a guaranteed number of seats in the provisional parliament and helped secure for them a 25 percent stake.

He helped strengthen some of the provisions in the interim constitution supporting the development of civic groups to organize people at a grassroots level, and worked to make the new government structure somewhat decentralized as a way of giving minority groups more of a voice and providing opportunities for grassroots participation. And he instructed, while learning.

In January, he outlined the four basic principles of democracy in a speech at Hilla University, discussing such issues as checks and balances and the rule of law. In February, at a conference in Baghdad on decentralization, he presented a 12-point description of how civil society helps build a stronger democracy.

In another address to Iraqis in late March, Diamond called the transitional law, as the interim constitution is called, the right path to "a true democracy," praised the spirit of compromise he found and promised the Iraqis that their nascent democracy would lead the Arab world.

But Diamond said it was around that time that the insurgency grew bolder, that more Americans and Iraqis began to die and that security appeared to be collapsing. He said he shuddered as he began to see other advisers getting killed on the same roads he traveled.

And then he had what he describes as a painful, transforming experience.

"I had one of those moments when you cut through all the bull," he said. "I was speaking to this women's group, and one woman got up and asked, 'If we do all these things, who's going to protect us?' " Diamond recalled. "That was the moment when I said to myself, 'Oh my God, some of these women are going to be assassinated because they are here listening to me.' It just struck me between the eyes."

As the violence spread, Diamond said, he felt ever more painfully the mistake the United States had made by not sending in more troops to keep the insurgents at bay.

The American policies basically encouraged Iraqis to stand up -- only to face the threat of being mowed down for doing so, he said.

"It was totally hypocritical of us to do one and not the other," Diamond said of the lack of security.

As a result, he said, democratization suffered potentially fatal setbacks. He was angry, he added, not just because optimistic Iraqis were being killed, but because the downward spiral was preventable.

His recommendations for rescuing the situation run counter to some of the policies that the Bush administration insists it will not alter. Diamond said that, in his view, the United States must more than double its current military force of about 135,000 and confront the violent Iraqi militias consistently, while offering political benefits to those who lay down their arms and accept democratic institutions.

The best he can say about the prospects in Iraq now is that, as he puts it, "civil war is not inevitable."

Diamond said that, realistically, he never expected a flawless democracy to emerge in just months. It was more likely, he said, that the legacies of traditional Arab society and dictatorship would have produced some rigged elections, corruption and sporadic violence. But with greater security, there would have been, at the least, a constitution and a more flexible and responsive government.

None of that is likely to happen now, he said, without significantly more American troops and a more assertive military stance.

"The literature stresses the overwhelming need to get the security under control," Diamond said. "Nothing that happened could not have been anticipated. I don't think we were applying the lessons of the past as systematically as they should have been, to put it as politely as possible."

In the past ten days, the US-led Coalition effort to rebuild Iraq as a stable, unified, and democratic state has fallen into crisis. The most alarming aspect is not the Baathist-inspired violence in Fallujah, bloody and horrific though that fighting has been. This has been a limited uprising from the minority Sunni section of the country, many of whose politicians have now entered the peaceful political game. It does not threaten the overall viability of the political transition program in Iraq.

The Shiite uprising that began a few days ago is another story, however. Scholars and historians of Iraq have long warned that an uprising among the Shia would spell doom for the Coalition, and for any hope of peaceful transition to a decent form of governance. We are not yet facing a generalized Shiite resistance. Rather, we are locked in a confrontation with a ruthless young thug, Muqtada al-Sadr, who leads an Iranian-backed, fascist political movement that spouts a shallow mix of Islamist and nationalist slogans in a bid to conquer power.

Among most Shia -- including, crucially, Iraq's most widely revered religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani-Muqtada Sadr is a reviled figure, a crude street tough with no religious qualifications and no positive political program, who has used coercion and intimidation as a substitute for genuine religious knowledge and authority. Unfortunately, however, since the Coalition began a crackdown ten days ago on his malicious operation, Sadr has maneuvered brilliantly to portray himself as the leader of a broader nationalist and Islamist insurgency. Now, growing numbers of frustrated and marginal young Iraqi men -- including it appears, some Sunni elements -- are rallying to his cause.

If we do not confront this new resistance in a politically agile and militarily forceful and adept manner, everything we have done to help Iraqis rebuild their country as a democracy could unravel in a matter of weeks.

The democratic transition is moving forward, in many inspiring ways. With US assistance, civil society is organizing, political parties are beginning to mobilize, and hundreds of "democracy dialogues" are discussing the country's constitutional structure and future. Two UN teams are consulting with Iraqis on how to structure the interim government that will assume power on June 30, and how to structure and administer the elections for a transitional government, due by this December or January.

However, elections can only go forward and the transition succeed if the agents and means of violence are brought under control.

Underlying the current upsurge in violence has been the mounting problem posed by heavily armed militias in the Shiite south. Loyal to political parties and religious militants, riven by factional divides, determined to impose an Iranian-style theocratic dictatorship, and lavishly armed, funded, and encouraged by various power factions in Iran, these radical Islamist militias (as well as Sunni and Kurdish peshmerga militias in the north) have been casting a long shadow over the political process in Iraq. In many provinces, the militia fighters outnumber and certainly outgun the new Iraqi armed forces.

Several Islamic fundamentalist parties have been playing a clever double game. As their representatives in Baghdad negotiate and compromise with other parties, exhibiting sweet reason and moderation, their militias have been stocking heavy arms, menacing opponents, and preparing for the coming war in Iraq.

Unless the militias are demobilized and disarmed, a transition to democracy in Iraq will become impossible. Rather, at every step of the way -- from the formation of parties, to the registration of voters, to the election campaign, to the casting and counting of votes -- the democratic process will be desecrated by violence, fear, and fraud.

Key officials within the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) have begun to recognize the urgency of this issue. Over the last three months, a plan has quietly been prepared and negotiated for the comprehensive disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of all the major militias. But this plan, which relies heavily on financial and employment incentives for voluntary compliance by the major militias, can only work if all the militias are disarmed. Those forces that will not negotiate and cooperate must be confronted and disarmed by force.

This brings us to the events of the last week, to the person of Muqtada Sadr, and to the biggest, most ruthless militia that stands indefatigably outside any process of negotiation and voluntary disarmament. A fiery thirty-one-year-old mullah, whose father and brothers were martyred in the Shiite resistance to Saddam, Muqtada has nothing of the Islamic learning and sophistication that would put him anywhere close to the religious stature and authority of an Ayatollah. But he knows how to organize, mobilize, and intimidatehas used the reputation of his father among the poor urban masses, and the language of historic resistance to external impositions, to mobilize a growing following among downtrodden young urban men in particular. His support is confined to a small minority among the Shia of Iraq, but it is the kind of minority, demographically, that makes revolutions and seizes power, and its devotion to his declarations and obedience to his commands is apparently intense.

In recent months, Sadr's militia -- the al-Mahdi Army -- and his loose political movement that surrounds it have been growing alarmingly in size, muscle, and daring. They have seized public buildings, beaten up university professors and deans, taken over classrooms and departments, forced women to wear the hijab, set up illegal sharia courts, imposed their own brutal penalties, and generally made themselves a law onto themselves. As with the Nazis or any other totalitarian movement, all of this street action and thuggery is meant to intimidate and cow opponents, to create the sense of an unstoppable force, and to strike absolute fear into the hearts of people who would be so na?ve as to think they could shape public policy and power relations by peaceful, democratic means.

As with the Nazis, Muqtada has been guilty of brazen crimes well before his effort to seize power openly. A year ago, Sadr's organization stabbed to death a leading moderate Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Abdel-Majdid al-Khoei, who would have been a force for peaceful democratic change and a dangerous rival to Sadr. The murder took place in the Imam Ali mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine. That is the level of respect that Sadr manifests for his own religion. Just three weeks ago, on the night of March 12, apparently in alliance with fighters from other Shiite militias and with the local Diwaniyya police force, the Mahdi Army invaded the Gypsy town of Qawliyya after a dispute over what Sadr's forces alleged were morals violations by the town. After pumping round upon round of automatic rifle fire, mortars, and RPGs into Qawliyya, the Mahdi Army brought in bulldozers and literally leveled a town of some thousand people. We still do not know how many people died in this blatant act of ethnic cleansing (as the towns folk had been warned in advance of the impending doom, and many if not most were able to flee). But at the very least, Iraq now has hundreds of internally displaced people from this incident of terror, and eighteen refugees apprehended by Sadr's forces endured ten days of brutal beatings in the organization's detention center. By the logic of Muqtada Sadr, this is the kind of "rule of law" Iraq needs.

In recent weeks, Sadr's propaganda, both in his oral statements and through his weekly newspaper, the Hawza, have become increasingly incendiary, propagating the most outrageous and explosive lies (for example, that the US was responsible for recent deadly bombings) deliberately designed to provoke popular violence. Finally, on March 28, after months of costly delay, the Coalition finally began to move against this monster. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer ordered the closure of the newspaper, and Muqtada Sadr reacted by ordering his followers to rise up violently against the Coalition. Perhaps in response, the Coalition finally ordered the arrest on April 4 of a senior Sadr aide, Mustafa al-Yacoubi, and 24 others -- including Sadr himself -- for the murder of al-Khoei. About half the suspects, including Sadr, are still at large.

Sadr responded to these arrests by unleashing a revolutionary campaign to seize power. Having already stormed numerous public building in recent months, his followers took over the offices of the Governor of Basra and assaulted police stations in several cities, including Karbala with its sacred Shiite religious shrines to the Imam Abbas and the Imam Husayn. In Najaf his followers invaded Shia Islam's holiest center, the Shrine of the Imam Ali. These attempted power grabs are not new. Last October, Coalition forces intercepted 30 busloads of a thousand heavily armed Sadr followers as they were headed down from Baghdad to Karbala to seize control of its shrines and the central city.

On Monday, the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, declared Muqtada Sadr an "outlaw." Now there is no turning back. If any kind of decent, democratic, and peaceful political order is to be possible in Iraq, the Coalition will need to arrest Muqtada Sadr, crush his attempt to seize power by force, and dismantle his Mahdi army.

We are now embarked on a dangerous and bloody campaign in which, tragically, many more American, other Coalition, and Iraqi lives will be lost. But if we do not confront this military challenge now, while we work to rebuild a broader consensus among Iraqi political forces on the rules of the game and the shape of the new political system, we will lose the second war for Iraq, with frightening implications not only for the peace and stability of that country and the wider region, but for our own national security.

Below are excerpts from the Straits Times piece. The piece is not reprinted in its entirety due to copyright reasons. Please visit the link below below to read the whole article. "...Said Indonesia specialist Donald K. Emmerson at the Institute for International Studies at California's Stanford University: 'My sense is that the election will be primarily about crime, stability, prices, not about religious issues.' Many Indonesia watchers in the U.S. have been surprised that Islam has not appeared to be a dominant factor in the campaign. Said Dr Emmerson: 'It's quite remarkable that in the Malaysian election religion was very important with respect to the PAS factor, but in Indonesia that is just not the case. And that is a huge relief to the US as it seeks to win the hearts and minds of moderate Muslims in the war against terrorism. ..."

Iraq is one of the world's least likely sites for a transition to democracy. Virtually all of the classic preconditions for liberal government are lacking. And yet, with its decades-long despotism shattered, Iraq is now better positioned than any of its Arab neighbors to become a democracy in the next few years. That achievement, however tentative and imperfect, would ignite mounting aspirations for democratization from Iran to Morocco.

On the ground in Iraq, the picture is quite different from the news we see at home. Yes, there are bloody acts of terrorism every few days. But it is not Iraqis who are staging the suicide bombings. Increasingly, Iraqis are fed up with this violence and turning in the criminals who are waging it. The dwindling ranks of saboteurs and dead-enders, in cahoots with al Qaeda and other jihadists, can blow up buildings and kill people. But they cannot rally Iraqis to any alternative political vision. They can only win if we walk away and hand them victory. Fortunately (for now), the administration, Congress, the American people, and key elements of the international community are not wavering. They are supporting an ambitious agenda for democratic transformation and reconstruction.

Led by liberal-minded Iraqi drafters designated by the Iraqi Governing Council, work is nearing completion on a Transitional Administrative Law that will structure government and guarantee rights from the transfer of sovereignty on June 30 to the seating of a democratically elected government under a new constitution. With its provisions for civil liberties, due process, separation of powers, devolution of power and other checks and balances, this will be the most liberal basic governance document anywhere in the Arab world.

Civil society is springing up. Associations of women, students, professionals,journalists, human-rights activists and civic educators, along with independent think-tanks, are building organizations, holding conferences and crafting the grant proposals that will enable them to work for democracy on a larger scale. In one university, a team of eight translators is at work full time translating works on democracy into Arabic.

Iraqi women -- organized in part into an Iraqi Higher Women's Council -- have come together rapidly across ethnic, regional and ideological lines to craft an impressive agenda for political inclusion and empowerment of women. Some new civic associations -- including a gifted group of democratically minded young people with skills in the visual arts -- are helping the Coalition Provisional Authority to produce an ambitious civic education campaign. Once each week, for the next several months, this campaign will distribute throughout Iraq a million leaflets, each batch explaining in simple terms a different concept of democracy: human rights, the rule of law, free and fair elections, participation, accountability, transparency, minority rights and so on. These will be reinforced with similar messages on radio and television.

Iraqi democrats of all ages believe passionately in the need to educate for democracy, from both secular and religious perspectives. They stress that democracy cannot be secure until "we get rid of the little Saddam in each of our minds." Hundreds of Iraqis are now being trained to facilitate "democracy dialogues" that will bring Iraqis together to talk about (and practice) these concepts of democracy. During the next year and a half, these town hall meetings will also provide a forum for Iraqis to participate in the drafting of their permanent constitution.

Over the next few months, Iraq will witness the most intensive flow of economic reconstruction and democracy-building assistance of any country since the immediate aftermath of World War II. New construction alone will dramatically reduce unemployment. Before long, a new Iraqi electoral administration will begin preparing the country for its first free and fair elections. And Iraqi political parties will receive training in democratic organization,recruitment, communication and campaigning.

The quest for a decent and democratic political order could founder on the shoals of intolerant, exclusivist identities. But recent developments generate cause for hope. In the negotiations on the transitional law, contending groups are working hard with one another (and with the CPA) to find formulae that will manage their differences and give each section of Iraq a stake in the new system. Public opinion polls show that almost half of Iraq's Muslims identify themselves not as "Sunni" or "Shia" but as "just Muslim." Fewer than one in five favor a party ideology that is "hardline Muslim."

Political leaders are beginning to reach out across traditional divides. A leading moderate Shiite Islamist on the Governing Council, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, recently delivered an eloquent public endorsement of a federal system for Iraq. Denouncing the long history of oppression of the Kurds, as well as other peoples, he declared, "Centralization is the source of our division. Either we engage in a bitter conflict over power or we devolve power to the fringes of society."

One of the most serious problems has been the deadlock over the Nov. 15 plan for indirect elections (caucuses) to choose a Transitional National Assembly(TNA). Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and most of his devoted Shiite followers have instead demanded direct elections before the handover of power on June 30. However, with the recent U.N. fact-finding mission to Iraq, led by Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi, a compromise resolution now seems imminent: direct elections for a TNA, but only by a timetable that would enable the country to attain the minimum administrative, security, technical and political conditions necessary for free and fair elections. Most experts think it will take at least nine to 12 months to prepare elections that will not be perfect but at least, in Mr. Brahimi's words, "reasonably credible."

It is going to take a lot longer than a year to build democracy in Iraq. Even after a new government is elected under a permanent constitution, the country will need extensive international assistance for many years to come to strengthen central and local government capacity, support civil society, and help fight crime, corruption, and terrorism.

Americans are not generally a patient people. We stayed the course to victory for four decades during the Cold War, but when it comes to nation-building, our impulse is to get in and get out quickly. That will not work in Iraq.

A democracy can be built in Iraq. No one who engages the new panoply of associations and parties can fail to recognize the democratic pulse and possibilities. But these new institutions and ways of thinking will only take root slowly. In the early years, they will be highly vulnerable to sabotage from within and without. The overriding question confronting the U.S. -- as the inevitable leader of a supporting coalition for democracy -- is whether we have the vision and the backbone to see this through.

A failed transition in Iraq will not see the country slip back into any kind of "ordinary" Arab dictatorship. The power vacuum in the country is too thorough, and the well of accumulated grievances too deep, to allow for that.If we withdraw prematurely and this experiment fails, religious militants, political extremists, external terrorists, party militias, criminal thugs, diehard Baathists and neighboring autocracies will all rush in to fill the void. Iraq could then become a new base for international terrorism -- Afghanistan with oil -- or fall victim to a regionally driven civil war, a hellish combination of Lebanon and the Congo. Any such scenario would suck the hope for democratic progress in the Middle East into its destabilizing vortex.

The thugs and terrorists are betting that if they generate enough terror and kill enough Americans, we will cut and run, as in Lebanon and Somalia. This is the one thing that Iraqi democrats fear more than anything else. I have repeatedly assured them, from my own conviction, that we will not abandon them. I hope I will not be proven wrong. Nothing in this decade will so test ourpurpose and fiber as a nation, and our ability to change the world for the better, as our willingness to stand with the people of Iraq over the long haul as they build a free country.

Russia's richest oilman and former head of Yukos Oil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, sits in jail as a Moscow City Court denied him bail in January. Proponents of renationalizing Russia's oil reserves continue to rejoice, as legal proceedings have started against some of the former top executives at Yukos for tax evasion.

Those events follow December's Duma elections in which the supporters of Russia's privatization program of the 1990s were dealt a decisive blow. With Mr. Khodorkovsky behind bars since October, hopes of the Putin government reaping a larger share of windfall profits from Russia's oil companies and redistributing them among the masses continue to grow.

Yet the survival of private oil companies in Russia is critical for sustaining and pushing forward broad-based economic and energy sector reforms. A return to state ownership could lead Russia down a similar path to other oil-rich states in the developing world that are plagued by weak institutions, centralized growth and unbalanced growth.

The government's recent freezing of billions of dollars of Yukos stock sent the

Russian stock market tumbling. It may have marked the first step toward redefining business-state relations ? through either a renationalization of the oil industry or unbridled government access to the oil companies' profits ? in directions dangerous to economic stability.

Russia is unique among resource-rich countries in the developing world, since it has privatized its oil sector. The oil sector in most other developing countries, such as Nigeria, is state owned. As a result, the Russian state doesn't accrue revenue from its abundant oil reserves directly but, rather, must negotiate with private domestic owners to receive its cut.

The existence of the private oil companies is responsible for spurring economic reform in Russia. Over the last few years, they have pushed for stable property rights, transparency, corporate governance and a new tax regime ? in order to maximize their profits, attract foreign partners and secure their investments over the long term.

Yet business-state relations in Russia are at an all-time low. A power struggle between Mr. Khodorkovsky and President Vladimir Putin may lie behind Russia's private oil sector troubles. Specifically, Mr. Khodorkovsky's foray into politics challenged an unofficial agreement between Mr. Putin and Russia's powerful business elite, known as the oligarchs: If the Russian oligarchs stayed out of politics, the Russian government would stay out of their businesses. By providing financial support for opposition political parties and revealing his own presidential ambitions, Mr. Khodorkovsky overstepped the boundaries of what was considered the proper role of the Russian business community. In many ways, Russia's struggle with Yukos and Mr. Khodorkovsky is analogous to the U.S. government's battle with John D. Rockefeller at the turn of the 20th century.

The Putin administration's legal actions against Yukos are driven primarily by its desire to prevent the giant from monopolizing the oil industry and thereby amassing greater political power. The recent collapse of the merger between Yukos and Sibneft is seen as a giant step toward curtailing Yukos' power. The Roosevelt administration was motivated by similar concerns when it sued Standard Oil in 1906 for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. In particular, it helped to define the respective roles of private business and government in the United States that have propelled its unprecedented economic growth -- the former as responsible property holders and reliable taxpayers and the latter as the chief regulator that protects property rights and ensures fair competition.

The Russian government's confrontation with Yukos is likewise a single episode in a drama that still is unfolding but ultimately could serve to bolster Russia's transition to a market economy by determining both the appropriate role of the state in the economy and of businessmen in politics.

Erica Weinthal is a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies. Jones Luong is an associate professor of political science at Yale University.