In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger narrates the trip of Iraqi democrats, average citizens, two of three brothers, to New York City and Washington, D.C.:

"Baghdad is booming," says Mohammed Fadhil Ali, one of three remarkable Ali brothers who oversee the Web log, Iraqthemodel.com. Mohammed and his younger brother Omar came this week to the Journal's offices, their first trip to the States, to discuss Iraq's future.

They were not overwhelmed by New York's holiday crush; Baghdad's population is roughly 5.7 million people. Stores there are overflowing with goods and the streets jammed with shoppers. It appears that the number of cars has doubled in a year. "The middle class is growing," says Omar. After the April 9, 2003, "liberation," Mohammed was determined to photograph every new building in Baghdad. "Now there is a new building in Baghdad every day; I can't count them all." Land and real-estate prices are surging. Most of the investment is coming out of the Arab world, not the West.

They made a couple of other interesting points about Iraq's political mood. One, Iraqis won't vote for a government dominated by Islamist religionists. Why? The abhorred next-door example of Iran's mullahs. This mirrors elections already held in Iraq. In a local election last year in Nazariya, with 47,000 votes cast amid imams urging support for Islamic parties, the biggest vote-getters were teachers, engineers and other professionals.

And current party coalitions notwithstanding, the man on the street is sounding cussedly independent. A farmer in Samarra told them: "I will vote for a good man, Shia or Sunni."

The cold-hearted miser Scrooge could be redeemed: so can an industrially godless mankind in 1948. Our future, if the shadows cast by rising democrats remain unaltered, will not be one of George Orwell's snide epigraph, "a boot stamping on a human face, forever." It will be one, made possible by George W. Bush, the Republican Party and the American moralist right, of democratic nations taking their place in an assembly of perpetual peace. Oddly enough, to the right of Henninger's column is a regular feature in the Journal called "American Conservatism." American as it may be, the right is not conservative — not in the sense of regression or reactionism. The Democrats are a party of what cannot and — as they see it — what should not be done. (Don't be fooled by the left's abuse of tradition parading as forward thinking; Dionysus, as it were, came to man before Apollo.) There is a terrible history behind those of us living today, a story written by man's rule through strength. The chapters cannot be erased, but the narrative can change. It is being changed — by the right.

If an opinion column can offer spectacular news of Iraq, can the right assume the vanguard and finally accept itself as the advocate for progress?