If you’re trying to use examples to make a point, you generally want those examples to be impeccable. Suppose a parent is trying to modify a child’s behavior, to get him to clean up his room more often. The rhetorical question “why can’t you be more like your brother?” is probably best left unasked if said brother did in fact keep an orderly room, but is also currently in prison for armed robbery, arson, fraud, and murder.

If you were trying to prod an increasingly authoritarian regime into more representative and emancipated governance, one might mention successful democracies like, say, Sweden, India, Canada, Holland, or relatively recent success stories like Poland or the Czech Republic. Violent, uncertain places like Iraq would probably be pretty far down on the list. I mean, seriously, what fool would hold up contemporary Iraq as a good example of democracy?

Oh, right.