Worth reading from today's Asia Times is this article by Chalmers Johnson, Peddling democracy the US way. Johnson is a leading scholar of East Asia. The article reeks of frustration. Some key quotes:

the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with the sins of hubris, racism and arrogance

On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, president Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes".

As Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority's law advisor, put it in November 2003, "If you move too fast the wrong people could get elected".

The Federation of American Scientists has compiled a list of more than 201 overseas military operations from the end of World War II until September 11, 2001, in which we were involved and normally struck the first blow. (The list is reprinted by Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated, p. 22-41.) The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not included. In no instance did democratic governments come about as a direct result of any of these military activities.

The article doesn't mention post-WW2 Germany (West), although arguably some of that country's more democratic institutions arose from British Labour Party influence (I'm thinking of the system of mitbestimmung, in which workers' representatives had a say in the management of their company - something the Labour Party could not impose in its own "democracy".)