Andy, I take your point about the lurid quality of the Times’s pessimism on Iraq, but I think there’s even more good news in the fact that Iraqis themselves are taking seriously the possibility of vote fraud. The Times is not responsible for the discovery of the suspiciously high vote totals in Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated provinces. Keeping scrupulous the process by which Iraq moves toward a democratic future is very nearly as important as the astonishingly impressive voter turnout.