Amilestone does not inform us whether the trail ahead is smooth or rocky, well marked or obscure, but it provides a place to pause and reflect. So too with the Iraqi election. It may weaken the insurgency by endowing the Iraqi government with a legitimacy and authority it now lacks, or by reinforcing Sunni resentment, strengthen it. But the election indubitably demonstrates the power of freedom, and the courage that love of it can elicit even in a terrorized population. Surely, even those so-called realists who disparage the project of building civil society in Iraq share Lincoln's wish, expressed about another group, also believed incapable of self-rule, “that all men every where could be free.”

This is a victory, no doubt about it. Iraq's journey may take many turnings, but it will not return to a past in which a totalitarian regime brutalized 85% of the population. It may, in the future, have its Salazar or Pinochet, it may writhe in anarchy or civil war, but Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party are gone. That is an achievement which, however perilous their condition now, most Iraqis do not wish to reverse. The menace of an Iraqi regime that intended to rebuild and extend its most dangerous capabilities has been removed, and possibly forever. Most of the Arab world may hate America, but a disjointed yet palpable movement for reform has gathered strength.