Americans generally have a benign view of the Kurds as the "good Iraqis," the ones unaffected by the confessional sectarian violence that ripped Iraq apart from 2005 to 2007. (Side note: It irritates me to no end that people lazily cite the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006 as the start date to the Iraqi civil war. That was an escalation, to be sure, but significant sectarian violence was visible in Iraq starting in 2004 in the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad. If you need a start date for the civil war, the January 2005 elections that entrenched sectarian political coalitions is pretty serviceable.) That’s in large part because of the skillful efforts of the Kurds to make clear that they really like American sponsorship. It’s also because the Kurdish experiment with self-government has met with remarkable success. You can’t really call a region that’s held two elections since 1991 democratic — both of them were forgone conclusions — but by the standards of, you know, Iraq, it’s impressive.

But when I visited Irbil in January 2006, I spent some time at the Sahahuddin University campus and learned that’s not how the Young People see it. The two ruling parties of Kurdistan, the KDP (which controls Irbil) and the PUK, were seen as corrupt entities. You needed to join the party to advance in the student union. You needed to join the party to get a good job. You needed to join the party to get government contracts. You needed to join the party to have a realistic shot at working on a newspaper. You needed to join the party. Beyond the discontent with how the parties acted like an oligarchy, the Youth didn’t like how the KDP and PUK weren’t moving fast enough to secure Kurdish independence. But it was mostly the fact that you needed to join the party to have a decent chance at life.

All of that serves as background to the news that a new party, the Change Party, did surprisingly well in the Kurdish election on Saturday. Change didn’t dislodge the oligarchy, but "people learned they can say ‘no’ to authority," a Change leader in Irbil told McClatchy. The reporter says that it’s not clear what the election’s impact would be, but my few weeks in Irbil years ago lead me to think that saying no to the PUK & the KDP were what a significant proportion of a new generation of Kurds had longed to do.