Category: World

A little belated, here’s Mark Steyn on the Iraqi elections.

I liked the picture of some grizzled beaming Arab so proud of his purple finger that he dipped a second one and then raised both to the camera – flipping the V sign, or so I like to think, to the BBC, to Sir Simon Jenkins, to Do-Nothing Doug Hurd, to those Spanish protesters and the rest of the quagmire fetishists. Even the most benign liberator can’t “give” liberty to someone: you have to want it, and take it for yourself.

Hat tip: Chrenkoff.

Purveyors of home furnishings in Iraq are having to change their inventory:

Before the war, low-ranking civil servants would have been content to earn the equivalent of $20. Now, they complain at anything lower than $300, observers say.

The result, according to carpet importer Ahmed Haji Rasul, has been a radical change in consumer taste. “In the past, people made do with what they could afford,” he told IRIN in the Sulaymaniyah bazaar. “Now they want colour-coordinated house interiors, European stuff. We’ve had to start importing from further afield.”

Read the this story and many more in Arthur Chrenkoff’s latest Good News from Iraq.