Elsewhere

Mark Steyn in The Australian:

AND so the "looming Iraqi election fiasco" joins "the brutal Afghan winter" and "the brutal Iraqi summer" and "the seething Arab street" and all the other junk in the overflowing trash can of post-9/11 Western media fictions. The sight of millions of brave voters emerging from polling stations holding high their purple dye-stained fingers was so inspiring that, from America's Democratic Party to European protest rallies, opponents of the war waited, oh, all of three minutes before flipping the Iraqis their own fingers, undyed.

"No one in the United States should try to over-hype this election," warned John Kerry yesterday before embarking on the world champion limbo dance of Iraqi election under-hyping.

He has a point. One vote does not a functioning democracy make. To be a truly advanced, sophisticated democracy you need an opposition party that knows how to react to good news by sounding whiny and grudging and moving the goalposts. "The real test is not the election," he declared, airily swatting aside 8 million voters. "The real test is..."

Michael Gove in The London Times

WHO WON the Iraqi elections? The formal counting won?t be over for days. But the result?s already clear. Iraq won. And who lost? Well, a full list would take up all this column, but, for starters, I would say that the people who seemed a little glum yesterday morning include Saddam Hussein, Robin Cook, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, George Galloway, Osama bin Laden, Douglas Hurd, Bashar al-Assad, Menzies Campbell, Jacques Chirac, BBC News and Current Affairs, Robert Fisk and Sean Penn. On Sunday Iraq enjoyed freedom. And enjoy seems to be the mot juste. Iraqis celebrated their chance to vote, revelled in it, embraced it. But for Robin, George, Douglas, Menzies, Jacques, Sean and those who joined them in opposition to the Iraq war there can?t be any great cause for celebration, can there? For none of this happened in their name.

Women in an Arab nation taking their place as free individuals alongside men, their voices and votes at last given equal weight. But not in your name, Robin. The Kurdish people, victims of chemical attack, ethnic cleansing, savage repression, at last voting to take their equal, respected, place in a new Iraq. But not in your name, George. The Shias of the south, after years in which their culture was marginalised, their lives held cheap, their faith mocked and their relatives tortured, now, at last, assuming a share of power in their own land, through the ballot box. But not in your name, Douglas. And an Arab nation, defying the racist stereotypes of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?s camel corps, shows itself not just ready but enthusiatic for democracy. It is a victory for the principle that human rights can have a universal application. But not in your name, Menzies.

Just as the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War compelled people to take sides between democracy and oppression, so the Iraq war forced a choice on us. All of us. It was a choice that became inevitable after the events of September 11.

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It has become a commonplace to assert that America squandered the world?s sympathy by going on to tackle Iraq after dealing with Afghanistan. But to wage war on Afghanistan without going farther would have been to squander something far more valuable, the moral high ground. Any old nation bent on revenge would have settled on Afghanistan. And left it there. But a nation determined to tackle the real root causes of terror had to go on. Because it is only by securing a decisive shift towards democracy across the region that the misery of the Middle East?s peoples can be relieved, and the threat to the rest of us brought to an end. Victory in the War on Terror depends not just on the elimination of regimes which sponsor terrorism, but on the nurturing of democracy?s roots in the hills of Kandahar, the banks of the Tigris and beyond.