Our editor-at-large puts questions to a political scientist--the former higher-education advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq--who replies with skepticism about prospects for our efforts to restore a university system in Iraq and reconstitute that troubled society in our image. Building an informed democracy, John Agresto asserts, is difficult, when you are trying to convert a pre-modern population, riven by ethnic and religious strife and armed to the teeth, that longs above all else for jihad and martyrdom.