Happy days are here again. Or so say William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the co-helmsmen of America's neoconservative establishment. In their upbeat Weekly Standard assessment of the December 15 Iraq parliamentary elections (reprinted in these pages yesterday), they ridicule "sour experts" whom they assert are going far out of their way to explain why "the peaceful election of a national assembly for a fully self-governing Arab democracy was not a turning point." But the election, according to Kristol and Kaplan, was no less than an "eruption of democracy in the heart of the Arab world."

Meanwhile, another neoconservative fellow traveller, Lawrence Kaplan, writes in The New Republic that while Americans have an understandable affliction of "milestone fatigue" after all previous celebrated "turning points"