I’m no historian, but it seems to me the path to democracy always goes through a warlord stage. The warlords have different names in different places. In the United States we had the robber barons, media barons, unions, and organized crime who effectively controlled the government. In England they had land barons foisting the Magna Carta on the king. In modern Russia it looks as if the billionaire criminals are running the country.
It seems to me that Iraq is right on track. The country is organizing itself around warlords and clerics, and they will eventually work out truces with each other. In the long run, those warlords or their successors will find their own greatest self-interest in supporting some form of national government while maintaining local control.
As the national government grows through taxation, it eventually becomes more powerful than any individual warlord and can start picking them off one at a time, just as the government of the United States targeted the Mafia.
Is Iraq on the only realistic path that can get it to a functional democracy?