Opinion: And so the "flop Iraqi election" joins the "brutal Afghan winter" and the "brutal Iraqi summer" and the "seething Arab street" and "Baghdad, the new Stalingrad" and the "massive humanitarian crisis" and all the other junk in the overflowing trash can of post-9/11 western media fictions which failed to pan out.
Just as the "brutal Afghan winter" which was supposed to mire shivering and starving American forces in the graveyard of empire is now a third of a decade behind schedule, so Iraq has now been "on the brink of civil war" for coming up to two years. That's quite a leisurely brink.
I said in an American column a couple of days ago that the turnout in the Kurdish north and Shia south would be higher than in the last US, British and Canadian elections. What a wimpish prediction. The overall turnout turned out to be higher than in the last US, British and Canadian elections. The national turnout number was so high, it was higher than tomorrow's daytime high in this year's "brutal Afghan winter" (62 and mostly sunny in Kandahar).
As I write, Reuters is estimating that 72 per cent of Iraqis went to the polls, despite being assured by the naysayers of the media that they wouldn't [ Iraq's Electoral Commission later revised this figure to something over 60 per cent turnout]. Given the extravagant, relentless focus on electoral antipathy in the Sunni Triangle, that means a phenomenal level of voter participation in other areas of the country.
Not everyone is happy. The election was "an act of folly in the eyes of so many Iraqis", declared a confident Robert Fisk, the beloved comic doom-monger. Care to pin down that "so many" a bit more precisely, Robert?
The BBC's Fadel al-Badrani reported: "A number of polling stations have opened in Fallujah in the north, north-east, and inside the public park. The turnout to all these stations is very low." What does "very low" mean in the context of what we've been told for months is an "insurgent stronghold"?
In his own pre-election message, Abu Musad al-Zarqawi denounced the "evil" of democracy and warned any Iraqis who went along with it that they'd be regarded as having gone over to the other side. Yet even in his so-called stronghold there were still brave Sunni men and women willing to defy the threats and intimidation and walk to the polling stations - a continuous steady stream of them. Oh, to be sure, a foolhardy suicide-cult with no popular support will still blow up cars and burn buildings, and they're savvy enough to do so in parts of the country conveniently located so that the western press corps don't have to stray far from their hotels to film it.
On Friday, I was a guest on the Hugh Hewitt Show, which came live from the polling station for Iraqi expats at the former El Toro Marine base in Irvine, California. Afterwards, the producer sent me a snap of one of the voters - a young lady called Marwa Sadik who had her hands raised in triumph and a big lovely smiling face radiating enough pride and happiness to burst her abaya. I've met hundreds of expatriates like Miss Sadik in the last couple of years. But what none of us could be sure of was how many there were like her in Iraq itself.
When I think back to my memories of cafés and schoolhouses and private homes in the west and north of the country 18 months ago, 90 per cent of the folks I spoke to were happy Saddam was gone. What wasn't so obvious was how committed they were to what would replace him. Even the most benign liberator can't "give" liberty to someone: you have to want it for yourself, and take it for yourself - and it was by no means clear that Iraqis wouldn't slump back into the deeply-ingrained fatalism and passivity that makes Arab culture so attractive to gloomy types like Robert Fisk.
Unlike Afghanistan, where pretty much every ethnic group participated in getting rid of the Taliban, in Iraq (aside from the Kurds) most people just sat in their homes and watched the coalition forces ride through.
For Iraqis, the liberation was not a heroic moment. But this weekend was. The election was their victory. Defying al-Zarqawi and Fisk, rejecting the narrative imposed on them by a decadent western media, the voters were truly heroic.
Even if you think that Bush and Rice and Rumsfeld have done everything wrong in post-war Iraq, to obsess on that is to miss something far more important - everything the Shia and Kurdish and even a few Sunni political groupings have done right. The Kurdish parties moderated their nationalist urges, the Shia clerics moderated their extreme theocratic urges, and they built political coalitions and fledgling municipal institutions which provided the springboard for this weekend's triumph. The western media missed that story.
You want to know what the real big story is? Expats weren't voting just in Sydney and London and Toronto: so were Iraqis living in Syria.
Think about that. If you're an Iraqi in Syria, you can vote for the political party of your choice. If you're a Syrian in Syria, you have no choice at all. Which of those arrangements is the one with a future? In November, the IMF reported that Iraq was the fastest-growing economy in the region. It's now setting the pace politically, too. So-called "moderate" Jordan, for years the least-worst state in the neighbourhood, is trying to catch up: for all his pooh-poohing of American efforts next-door, King Abdullah is quietly borrowing a lot of Iraqi ideas for his own belated steps towards political liberalisation. Freedom may not exactly be on the march, but it is inching forward in a part of the world notoriously inimical to it.
Nobody should underestimate the problems ahead: arguments between Kurds and Arabs about decentralisation, between secularists and theocrats over the role of Islam. But, whatever happens, this weekend's election was a rebuke to the parochial condescension of the west's elites. "These elections are a joke," Juan Cole, a "professor of modern Middle East history" at the University of Michigan, told Reuters.
Sorry, professor, the joke's on you. And the modern Middle East history is being made by the people of Iraq.