As President-elect Obama prepares to carry out his promise to pull the troops out of Iraq, Iraqis are worrying about how their country will manage once the Americans go home. Will Iraq be plunged into another round of bloody civil war? Will it break up into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states? Will it survive as a Middle Eastern-style dictatorship, or emerge from the nightmare of foreign occupation as a truly democratic country?

No one can be sure at this point, but some well informed and thoughtful Iraqis fear that the last option – the American-style democracy that the Bush administration wanted to impose on them and for which so many American soldiers gave their lives – is the least likely.

The Bush administration boasts that the Iraqis have held several free elections since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and will vote again on January 31st in provincial elections. But real democracy is more than the process of electing officials. It's a cultural norm that determines how citizens and their leaders behave after elections. By that standard, Iraq's elected leader, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, falls far short of the mark.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, an Iraqi journalist who is currently studying at a London think tank, says “Maliki is not Saddam yet, but he is half-way there.” He points out that Maliki hands out cash to people on the streets like some medieval monarch and blacklists journalists who fail to grovel and feed his personality cult. In short, he says, the prime minister is guilty of “autocratic behavior that should have been purged from democratic, post-Saddam Iraq.” Saddam may be history, he says, “but not so the language once used to praise him, or the behavior of his successors.”

Another disillusioned Iraqi, Dr. Ali Allawi - a distinguished intellectual who held high posts in several post-Saddam governments - says Iraq is now a “semi-authoritarian, semi-democratic” state that is “very unstable.” He says his country went through a “vicious civil war” last year – a power struggle between Sunni and Shia Iraqis that the Shias clearly won – and that now the Maliki government is “entirely dysfunctional.” It has a number of anti-corruption commissions that are “entirely corrupt'” and electoral commissions that are “totally partisan.”

Allawi says the current government is kept in power by oil revenues and what he describes as the aggressive American effort to control the country. He believes that a sustained drop in the price of oil to around $40 as barrel would have a “catastrophic effect” on the government, and warns that although Al Qaeda in Iraq has been weakened, it has not disappeared. Although he is pessimistic, he does not believe the most likely end result will be another civil war, or that the country will fall apart. Instead, he believes the post-occupation Iraq may end up as a semi-democracy dominated by powerful Iraqi families, with Iran playing a large role in its affairs.

That would be better than the brutal Saddam dictatorship President Bush crushed. But it would not be a brilliant outcome, considering the huge Iraqi death toll and the trillion or so dollars and more than 4,000 American lives the Iraq campaign has cost the United States. Future historians will judge whether it was worth the cost.