Diana has some evolutionary psychologically related thoughts on Iraq. She expresses some interesting ideas that echo some of the stuff Steve & Randall have noted, and in a more muted & less biological fashion Stanley Kurtz.

Iraq is different than the United States, whether that be in 2004, or the Colonial America of 1776. This implies that simple mappings of a Jeffersonian Democracy were hogwash. I do find it ironic that the more hard-headed realists on this issue until recently were on the Left-for political reasons-when normally it seems liberal intellectuals prefer the hyper-plastic model of the mind espoused by neural connectionists (and implicitly more cultural plasticity), which seems to be in the minority, as oppose to those who argue for more hard-wired "innateness" (ergo, more fixed cultural variants that are modifications on a universal theme).

I would add one important caveat to Diana's assertion that "Democracy happens where you have a society that is thoroughly dominated by a high-status group that is democratic." I would insert the qualification that there must be the perception of meritocracy, or democratic process, in the type of elite she describes. For example, the Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia justified the New Economic Plan (NEP), partially on the basis that common Malays needed to see some rich successful Malays so that they too felt that a capitalist society can be beneficial to their interests. Of course, detractors of such a perspective would point out that rationally such a system makes everyone poorer (by allocating capital & resources to those who are less efficient at converting them to economic production), and even the likes of Mohammed have admitted that perception is not reality in this case, and the Malay plutocracy is simply the well connected parasitic elite of old (Mohammed also does not publicize that his father was a Tamil Muslim, not a Malay!). In reality, there isn't that much mobility in Malaysia among the indigenous people when viewed along the axis of lineage & pedigree.

This brings to the point the importance of proximate traits: brown-skinned Malays who worship Allah are outwardly similar to the typical bumiputra, ergo, the common Malay is psychologically mollified ("That could be me!") [1]. A cost vs. benefit analysis that shows in explict numbers the increased personal expense that accrues from the Chinese capital class' subsidization of Malay tycoons would likely be irrelevant, and I suspect that common Malays on some level understand that Malay tycoons are less efficient at advancing the state of the national economy than more saavy Chinese entrepreneurs (much of this thinking reflects Amy Chua's World on Fire) [2]. Modern capitalist democracies to some extent "fool" our natural genetic affinity detectors because they leverage ancient hunter-gatherer predispositions in an alien context.

This makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of ethnic groups being "extended families" (in the ancient ur-human culture, a related clan who shared custom & outward appearence). I am still skeptical that a selfish gene vantage-point would justify the Malay peasant's acceptance of a parasitic elite that "looks like them" (Malays are admixed with Indian & Chinese converts to Islam), but this might go some way to explain why indigenous peoples behave "irrationally." As Diana notes, Iraquis are simply coalitions of extended families-and what is less important than absolute well-being is relative well-being and status. Becoming a quiescent protectorate of the United States would be the road to absolute comfort (if not affluence, look at Puerto Rico), but it would also diminish the chances of members of the Iraqi "elite" (or nascent elite) from attaining the alpha male glory they so crave. Ancient humans had little experience with relatively beneficial protectorates of a larger wealthy clan over a smaller clan. On the other hand, clan jostling and back-stabbing were common tendencies that resulted fruitfull multiplication (if you look at the early period of written history before the explosion of transcultural religious ideologies).

Finally, let me note that Cavalli-Sforza's new book on consanguinity notes that elevated levels of consanguinity are a characteristic of societies in demographic transition (this was the case in Italy between 1850-1950). Of course, much of the Arab world is in demographic transition right now (I will blog in more detail about this later).

Addendum: As I've noted before, the dynamics of human societies vary are dependent on time & place. But, it seems plausible that the most "stable equilibriums" are those where there is enough social & occupational specialization to maintain a complex polity, but, avenues for mobility upward of the "lower orders" so that this stratification is accepted. For example, the Roman polity regulary extended the franchise to conquered elites (piece-meal), the Confucian Mandarinate was famous for its promotion from the middling ranks and the European medieval order was dynamic in that local men of prominence (gentry) were often ennobled.

[1] When I was in New York City, I saw an interview with people in Jennifer Lopez's old Bronx neighborhood about her mother winning the lottery. Everyone admitted that the Lopez family didn't need anymore money, but they were happy that "someone from the neighborhood was making it so well."

[2] This sort of think can have really counter-productive consequences-for instance, one could imagine how a group wants "doctors that look like them," so quotas are set to educate physicians of ethnicity X. Of course, this might result in poorer care for ethnicity X (assuming that doctors of ethnicity X tend to work among ethnicity X) as meritocratic admissions are undermined.