IT was the "big-tent" meeting that really did take place in a big tent. An air-conditioned one, in fact, at an airbase at Ur, birthplace of Abraham, near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

Aiming to bring in delegates from all parts of the vast maelstrom which is the Iraqi opposition, yesterday's talks were the first stage in the journey towards creating a new government in Iraq.

But while no one is under any illusions that it will be easy, the tent turned out not to be as big as had been hoped. The largest group representing the Shia Muslims, themselves the largest group in Iraq, refused to attend. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said it was boycotting the meeting in protest at the US role, and thousands of Shias took to the streets of Nasiriyah to demand US withdrawal from their country.

Relief at the fall of Saddam could quickly turn into resentment at the continued presence of an occupying power.

The US plan is to install retired General Jay Garner as an interim leader, bringing Iraqis into the administration, until the US can pull out and leave the Iraqis to run their own government. But, while this may be a laudable aim, it runs counter to the experience of history, according to David George, lecturer in Middle East politics at Newcastle University.

"The problem with this is that we tried it way back when we created Iraq at the end of the First World War. We established a monarchy and political institutions, although it was not a democracy, and it went belly-up," he says.

"We spent about 30 years readying them for self-government, but, despite all that, we didn't manage to set them up as a fully-functioning liberal democratic society."

At the end of the First World War, the British were given a mandate over the Mesopotamian provinces by the League of Nations, as part of the carve-up of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The provinces were merged, called Iraq, and a puppet king, Faisal I, installed.

In 1932, Iraq was given notional independence, but the British still pulled the strings until 1958, when Faisal II and his family were butchered in a revolution, ushering in 20 years of coups and counter-coups, until the arrival of Saddam Hussein.

Not only does Iraq not have any history of stable democracy, but nor has democracy taken root elsewhere in the Middle East. Apart from Israel, the only democratic state in the region is Turkey, and it may be Turkey which is the model for US aspirations for Iraq, says Mr George: a secular state where the military largely stays behind the scenes.

But he says the prognosis for achieving a stable political settlement over the next five years is not good, not least because of the divisions between the various factions of the Iraqi opposition. Nor does Iraq possess some of the pre-requisites for establishing a legitimate and accepted government.

"There isn't any tradition of co-operation and willing surrender of power, or the rule of law - all the key features of democracy. It is like parachuting them in from the moon; they're quite alien to this society," he says.

And not only is it alien, but democracy also runs the risk of being dismissed as a foreign import and un-Islamic, he adds. In a region where the West is painted as interfering and imperialist, a form of government brought in from the West may be starting at a disadvantage.

But the view that the Middle East in general - and Iraq in particular - is not fertile ground for democracy, is rejected by Pat Chilton, professor of international relations at Sunderland University, who worked closely with Iraqi opposition groups at the end of the last Gulf War.

"I think they went a long way down the road to a multi-party democracy before things went pear-shaped in the 1950s. There were people beginning to do things in a parliamentary way," she says. "I believe there is every chance that Iraq, with its multi-ethnic and multi-faith composition, would be able to operate as a democracy at a reasonable point in the future."

Prof Chilton sees the danger in the US trying to rush forward democracy, a process which has taken several hundred years to evolve in the West, with the situation not made any easier by the collapse into lawlessness in the immediate aftermath of the end of Saddam's regime.

There are positive signs in the experience of Iraq's neighbour, and bitter rival, Iran. The demise of the Shah was followed by a period of virulently anti-Western autocratic theocracy, as the Ayatollahs held Iran in their harsh grip, in part a reaction against US support for the Peacock Throne. But recent years have seen signs of an emerging movement towards greater freedom and democracy.

But if democracy is to emerge in Iraq, it cannot be the result of diktats from the West, Prof Chilton says.

"I don't think there is any reason why Iraq shouldn't grow its own democracy, but the idea that we can say we will tell them how to do it is not the way to go," she says. "It is not that they don't want more say in government and more freedom, because they do.

"It might take a while, and it will require practical support, and it is going to need a lot of patience, and I don't think it should be pushed. It is always a bad idea to push for quick elections, because you then get twisted outcomes, as we saw in the Balkans.

"It is better to wait and help the local processes along, and stand back as much as possible."

Mr George says the immediate future, for the next six months or a year, may well see General Garner establish some sort of federal structure in Iraq, with the Kurds in the north, the Shias in the south and the Sunnis in the middle. Garner may well have the ability to bang heads together to keep this system in place while the US is still there in force, but once the troops are withdrawn, the outlook is not so promising.

"I could well see us getting a re-run of the period from 1958 to the mid-1960s, with a weak Iraq, which will encourage instability in the region and factional conflicts," he says.

"There may well be short-lived regimes, and the inevitable outcome is a strong man will emerge to run the country. Democracy is a very, very big gamble in Iraq, and I don't want to be pessimistic, but I would not put any money on it sticking."

It was the fragility of successive regimes which led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein in 1979 as the strong ruler who restored stability. It would be an irony if, at some point in the future, removing him from power proved to be the first step on the path towards the creation of another Saddam.