The Democrats' 'Uncivil War' on the Iraqi elections

Mark Steyn slaps John Kerry and the Democrats around in his great article entitled The 'civil war' that wasn't:

AND so the 'looming Iraqi election fiasco' joins 'the brutal Afghan winter' and 'the brutal Iraqi summer' and 'the seething Arab street' and all the other junk in the overflowing trash can of post-9/11 Western media fictions. The sight of millions of brave voters emerging from polling stations holding high their purple dye-stained fingers was so inspiring that, from America's Democratic Party to European protest rallies, opponents of the war waited, oh, all of three minutes before flipping the Iraqis their own fingers, undyed.

'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. [emphasis mine—johnh] 'The real test is not the election,' he declared, airily swatting aside 8 million voters. 'The real test is...'

I dozed off at that point, so I'm unable to tell you what moved goalposts the senator inserted. But no doubt they involved, as they always do, the Bush administration needing to 'reach out' more effectively to involve the 'international community'.
'International community', by the way, doesn't mean Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles, Japan, India, Fiji, et al but Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, a pantomime horse in which both men are playing the rear end. But, in an advanced, sophisticated democracy, that's how we define the 'international community': no matter how many foreigners are in your coalition, it's unilateral unless Jacques is on board.

Yup, Steyn has it right.