Add it all up and the bottom line becomes clear: Saudi Arabia actually cares more about nurturing democracy in Iraq than Germany and France.

Moreover, Brookings is a non-ideological public-policy institute, dedicated to nurturing American democracy.

We haven't even been able to nurture full democracy in modern, bustling Kuwait, where women still cannot vote, or in Saudi Arabia, which is more egalitarian - neither men nor women can vote.

There are more useful, less expensive ways to nurture future democracy.

Under federal guidelines, they are supposed to nurture democracy in a nonpartisan way, lest they be accused of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations.

But what emerges from the events in Haiti is a portrait of how the effort to nurture democracy became entangled in the ideological wars and partisan rivalries of Washington.

In just three generations, one small city - by today's standards, anyway - nurtured democracy, became a superpower and produced some of the greatest artists, writers, philosophers and historians the world has ever known.

It is not as if Washington can do much to nurture Iranian democracy.

How to nurture Soviet democracy is a matter of some uncertainty.

But the business community seems to be the sector of Hong Kong society that is most skeptical about the prospects for nurturing democracy in China's backyard.