Democracy for everyone was NOT in the cards. The choice was to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler or ally with Hitler to defeat Stalin or stay away from the conflict. The first choice brought/secured democracy in Western Europe, the second and third would kill chances for democracy in the WHOLE Old World, and possibly in USA as well.
Do you get it?
I was referring to an example of dictatorship such as existed under Saddam: hard core Stalinism. Apparently from your first post, you would have preferred that we preserve such a dictatorship in Iraq for the sake of so-called stability, rather than risk Democracy, as we are doing now.
After defeating Nazism, we quickly distanced ourselves form our Soviet ally and pushed for Constitutional democratic governments in those areas of Europe and Asia we controlled. Although it took decades, we were successful and stable, productive nations arose from the effort.
Meanwhile, the Soviets and the Chicoms pushed for stable communist dictatorships in the areas they controlled. They were almost immediately successful in achieving stability locally, but devastated the economies of everywhere they touched with their backward brutality. It took 50 years of cold war to resolve this tension: the "stability" of mutually assured nuclear destruction.
Now, we are in a similar situation. We can choose to support the false stability of dictatorship, attempting to play the local Mid East hatreds and feuds off against each other. This was the solution of the post WWI British and French to the break up of the Ottoman Empire, and the solution of GHWB after Gulf War I. It demonstrably fails in its objective.
Or, we can attempt to change the dynamic, and free the people of the Mesopotamian Basin from oppression and let them govern themselves Maybe they'll screw up and collapse into civil war as you fear. We did, but survived to grow greater still. And if this historically keystone region succeeds as well as Poland has, it will forever break the stranglehold of the dictators under which terrorism thrives as a tool of policy.