ARTHUR CHRENKOFF is at it again with the 21st installment of his Good News from Iraq series:

Mark Steyn, the joker in the conservative pundit deck, but also in many ways the shrewdest and the most insightful of the lot, wrote in the aftermath of the Iraqi poll:

Like a four-year-old child, the media were so distracted by bright colours and loud noises that they missed the real story. Set fire to a second-hand Nissan and they send a camera crew round to take pretty pictures of the big plume of smoke rising up in the sky.

But the seeds of a democratic culture are harder to spot.

Which is why many of those who for almost two years provided us with a steady diet of disaster and negativity out of Iraq were unprepared and quite clearly taken aback by the spectacle of majority of Iraqis defying the terrorists and insurgents to participate in by large a free and successful democratic election.

Steyn is right; the seeds of a democratic culture are harder to spot, particularly for the media that obsesses with reporting events (explosions, gunfights) as opposed to processes (reconstruction - physical, political, spiritual - of a country and society). The verdict on Iraq remains open. Only time will tell whether Saddam's former fiefdom will become a normal and successful state, perhaps the first Middle Eastern domino to fall for democratization and reform, or whether political and religious entropy will prevail to send Iraq down a spiral of theocracy, or perhaps civil war and territorial disintegration.

Yet, if Iraq does pull through, the signs of slow and gradual progress were always there to see. I have been chronicling them in this series for nine months now, and when majority of Iraqis defied threats and cast their ballots of January 30, I was not surprised; the successful election was not a bolt out of the blue but a culmination of a year and a half of hard work by millions of Iraqis and citizens of the Coalition countries. To use Churchill's formulation, the election, of course, is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but hopefully the end of the beginning. Let us all hope that the journey will continue in the right direction. In the meantime, here are some snapshots from the past two weeks along the way.

Don't miss'em.