Although Michael Totten's report from Iraq's Kurdish north is mostly about the region's progressivity and its peoples' impatience with a slowly reforming south, the article offers anecdotal evidence for the enthusiasm for democracy where autocracy has been long thought endemic. Nevertheless, National Review's Andrew Stuttaford saw an opportunity to denigrate the country's Arab state and society, and did so. While Kurds have among them neither the foreign invaders nor the native instigators found in southern and especially central and western Iraq, they currently are not, as a culture, what Westerners identify as cosmopolitan, nor have they been immemorially prepared for the establishment of government by consent. It was one decade of the Anglo-American aegis, sparing Kurds the most oppressive and corrosive elements of Saddam Hussein's gangsterdom, in which Kurds — not yet with a generation having lived under free, electoral representation — still found cause to quarrel with and combat one another. Inurement to authoritarian culture is, per the Kurdish experience, feasible but requires time; which Arab Iraq has not been given. Are the Kurds an example of aberration or, with the whole of Iraq tens of millions of freely cast votes richer, auspication?