One of my favorites recent commentaries on the Middle East came from the satirical Web site the Onion, which offered the following assessment: “Maybe it’s time we stopped talking about the Middle East crisis and started talking about Middle East culture.”

With Iraqi elections days away, terrorist forces are doing their best to kill the hope of a budding democracy through intimidation and assassination. Their threat to fill the streets with the blood of voters should make every civilized individual feel a stake in the success of the elections. And yet, many Westerners have expressed doubts about the wisdom of these elections, both the timing and whether they should be going on at all. In their reservation is more than just anti-Americanism, it is a question of whether Arab culture can support or sustain a democracy.

Culture does have a way of outlasting all other factors. On a trip to Vietnam eight years ago, I saw surprisingly few significant reminders of the war with America, but press coffee and French bread at countless cafes were daily evidence of the decades-long French occupation of that nation.

Watching the news, it is sometimes hard to remember that there was an Iraq before Saddam Hussein, before Zarqawi. But it cannot be pointed out too many times that this is the cradle of civilization, the land of Gilgamesh. And there is also reason to appreciate a far smaller detail from the nation’s more recent past, the appearance of a slight, near 90-year-old Wisconsin-bred American architect in Baghdad a half-century ago.

Frank Lloyd Wright visited Iraq in 1956, when he was commissioned by King Faisal II to build an opera house and other structures in downtown Baghdad. This was a nation reaching out to the world with its newfound oil wealth, not conspiring within a limited vision of Islam-under-siege to keep the world away.

Wright was one of a series of legendary Western architects brought in by the King to re-establish Baghdad as a world capital – Walter Gropius was asked to design Baghdad University and Charles Edouard Le Corbusier contributed to what would eventually become the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium.

Wright chose an island in the middle of the Tigris River as the location of his Opera House. He drew upon his childhood love for the stories of “The Arabian Nights” and imagined a soaring structure that was not Western architecture imposed on the Iraqi landscape, but an homage to the city’s fabled history enhanced by Western technology. The building was aligned with Mecca and crowned with an Ottoman-inspired dome. The ancient ziggurat spiral formation – already used in inverted form by Wright to design Fifth Avenue’s Guggenheim Museum – was used as a basis for a monument to the city’s ancient leader Haroun al-Rashid. But Wright also ingeniously used the ziggurat design as a parking solution for more than 1,000 cars in the Opera complex. He drew plans for two art museums – one for modern art and one for ancient Sumerian statues – as well as a planetarium. There were spherical shopping kiosks, a citrus garden, tree-lined streets, and ornate bridges over the Tigris. Capping the dome of the Opera House, Wright imagined an immense television antenna to broadcast the new technology far and wide.

Wright’s plans for Baghdad were largely completed but never constructed. In 1958, King Faisal II and his family were murdered in a military insurrection that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein to power.

But a city that once opened its arms to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright has a cultural affinity for the West that is unusual for Arab countries in the Middle East. It is consistent with a culture that was once the cosmopolitan cradle of civilization and so far not seduced by the temptations of radical Islam.

If Wright’s designs offer a glimpse into what might have been for Iraq, they also offer a vision of a possible future. One of Wright’s insights was that Western-designed architecture must look and feel authentic and respectful of the ancient civilization in order to be accepted. The Iraqi people had to feel a sense of ownership. This applies to development of Iraqi democracy as well.

Television producer and journalist Camilla Webster was with Fox News in Baghdad and subsequently worked on “Inside Baghdad,” a documentary about Baghdad’s history. When asked about Wright’s designs and the prospects for Iraqi democracy, she said, “America had a very violent birth and Iraq will suffer the same in the pursuit of freedom and independence from tyranny. But it is, after all, the cradle of civilization, with resources and people of great strength. I believe it will eventually be seen as the Phoenix of the Middle East. I think that’s what Wright saw when he approached Baghdad – a historic culture that can provide a strong foundation on which to build a better future.”

The upcoming elections in Iraq present a nation trying to rise from the ashes. It is a heroic venture, but whatever the immediate outcome, it seems clear that the hard work of winning the peace and establishing Iraqi democracy has just begun. But beyond the violence of the recent decades, there is reason to hope that the outward looking, worldly culture of Iraq might again emerge.

In homage to that vision, it also might not be too much to wonder if whether amid the billions of dollars of Western investment, private funds could be raised to finally build Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs. Like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, such an undertaking would send an unmistakable signal about the resurgence taking place in Baghdad of the near future, helping to make the city a cultural beacon for the region. The fact that it would mark the resumption of an interrupted vision of American-Iraqi cooperation makes it poetic justice as well as a practical foundation for a thriving free-market and democratic future.