> Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan

Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...

Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.

There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.