shift in foreign policy in the Muslim world. Although protests against the Iraq War in particular widely criticized American intervention as a form of neocolonialism, American political rhetoric during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars centered on the purpose of the wars being to bring democratization in the region, as the invasions of those countries were partly for purposes of organizing democratic governments. Opponents of American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq have, however, criticized that democracy cannot be imposed from outside. The two countries have since had relatively successful elections, but have also experienced serious security and development problems. Some believe that democracy can be established "only through force" and the help of the United States. Writers such as Michele Dunne, when writing for the Carnegie Paper concurs with the rhetoric of the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (at that time, referring to peace and terrorism) that the foreign policy position of the US should be to 'pursue peace as though there were no democratization, and pursue democratization as though there were no peace. In other words, the U.S. government should pursue reform and democratization as policy goals in the first instance without worrying excessively about tradeoffs with other goals." The U.S. pressure behind the calling of the 2006 Palestinian legislative election backfired, resulting in the democratically sound victory of Hamas, rather than the US-supported Fatah. Drawing upon the ideas of Middle East scholar Nicola Pratt it can be argued that: …the outcome of democratization efforts is [in reality]…contingent upon the degree to which actors' chosen strategies contribute to either reproducing or challenging the relations of power between civil society and the state. However, recent academic critics have characterized intervention in the Middle East as a means towards engendering democracy a failure. The 2011 study Costs of War from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies concluded that democracy promotion has been flawed from the beginning in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with corruption rampant in both countries as the United States prepares to withdraw many of its combat troops. On a scale of democratization established by Transparency International, Iraq and Afghanistan are two of the worst-ranked countries in the world, surpassed in corruption by only Myanmar and Somalia. Measures of democracy There are several non-governmental organizations that publish and maintain indices of democracy in the world, according to their own various definitions of the term, and rank countries as being