Out of the mouths of babes

As has already been noted, Radio National relief Summer host Stephen Crittenden is a man who can find head-shaking paradoxes where the rest of us just see clear daylight. Not surprisingly, Stephen's paradoxes tend to inhabit that liminal territory where the ABC mindset rubs up against what the rest of us think of as the Real World.

On this morning's Breakfast he was talking to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about the largely trouble-free first day of polling in Iraq. Stephen was puzzled - he contrasted the 'Iraq' in which, as he put it, civil war has already broken out, with the Iraq in which a national election can be conducted in relative calm:

"It sometimes seems like we're talking about two different countries."

Exactly, Stephen, exactly...