The problem with democracy.
One of the pillars of the Bush Doctrine is the idea that democracy will alleviate instability in the Middle East. Democracy is equated with freedom and liberty, which is equated with security and stability. The validity of that logic is obviously suspect after witnessing the chaos unfold in Democratic Iraq and elsewhere. The flaw lies in the assumption that oppression is the engine that perpetuates the Middle East conflict. Oppression is certainly a cause for concern; something that should be decried and dismantled, wherever it exists in the world. But the Middle East conflict is much deeper and much older than one oppressive regime. It's a conflict our own country has played a role in, and history cannot simply be erased by enfranchising the people who store its memories. In point of fact our actions exacerbated the conflict by our failure to understand it.
The second problem with democracy is one that manifests itself here at home. Namely that democracy as we practice it does not bring us closer to the truth. We (as a country) lack a critical understanding of the relationship between our goals, our actions, and our results. Instead we (the people) choose elected officials to represent our interests, and those elected officials decide a course of action based on a gut feeling of how the world works, no matter how far removed it is from the truth. It provides no accountability. No verifiable results. The only feedback occurs at the ballot box, when we the people decide once again how well those elected offials are representing our interests. The scientific method is a much more useful model of how one can arrive at a practical understanding of cause and effect. Establish a hypothesis, design an experiment and predict results, run the experiment and verify the results. If the results contradict your predictions, well then maybe you didn't start with a solid foundation and you need to rethink your worldview.