A Mark Steyn double

The One-Man Global Content Provider himself strikes twice today, once in The Australian, and in his regular gig with his Tuesday Daily Telegraph column. First, this crack from The Australian column:

"No one in the United States should try to over-hype this election," warned John Kerry yesterday before embarking on the world champion limbo dance of Iraqi election under-hyping. He has a point. One vote does not a functioning democracy make. To be a truly advanced, sophisticated democracy you need an opposition party that knows how to react to good news by sounding whiny and grudging and moving the goalposts.

His Telegraph column contrasts the freedom-loving and brave Iraqis with the moral cowardice and intellectual vapidity of Western Europe. Two excerpts; first, this comparison of Iraqi voters with Spanish protestors decrying the election:

. . . there they were, prosperous, well-dressed Spaniards waving placards showing US missiles and dollar bills going into the ballot box and noisily objecting to the fraud of a so-called election held under American occupation.

Given the fact that the voters of Baghdad and Basra and Kirkuk showed the cojones the Spaniards failed to last March, you'd think those protesters would have been less careless about reminding us that the terrorists got a much better election result out of the Spanish electorate than they did from the Iraqis.

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In Europe and North America, the western Left have got on the wrong side of this movement. Shame on them - particularly those who've accused me of "Islamophobia" these last three years; I'm not the one marching in the streets against Muslim democracy and insisting that Arabs much prefer the "security" of dictatorship.

Second, this sharp observation on the meaning of the Iraqi vote and its ramifications in the region:

Three years ago, Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post observed that if Robert Mugabe turned up at an Arab League meeting he'd be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. That's no longer true. And that's the real significance of what's been happening in Iraq, from the municipal elections last year to this vote to the constitutional assembly.

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. . . The most fascinating detail in the big picture was this: Iraqi expats weren't voting just in Sydney and London and Los Angeles, but also in Syria. Think about that. If you're an Iraqi in Syria, you can vote for the political party of your choice. If you're a Syrian in Syria, you have no choice at all. Which of those arrangements is the one with a future?

Read them both in full.