In a large and complex typology, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan have isolated three ways in which defeat in war could play a major role in transitions from authoritarian to democratic forms of rule. Interestingly, however, a careful study of their options, based on preexisting regime types (totalitarian, sultanist, post-totalitarian, and authoritarian, with the first two allowing the same externally dominated transition path only) reveals that they may be thinking ultimately of only two types of cases. The first is when a dictatorship, its state and society, suffer total defeat in war and an external power is free to occupy and impose for a considerable period without much resistance. Germany and Japan could be considered examples of this phenomenon, even if, as I will later show, in neither case can we speak of absolute imposition. The second type is when a dictatorship suffers a military defeat that domestically discredits it and forces it to accept a process of internally steered and negotiated regime change with, or more usually without, some influence by the military victor. Here Greece in the 1970s and Argentina in the 1980s come to mind. Neither type covers Iraq very well, because Iraqi society did not suffer total defeat, yet the military victor tried to assume total control over the transition process. Note that in all four examples, unlike Iraq, the dictatorship was the initiator of the hostilities it subsequently lost.