Democracy is a beautiful thing, but never so beautiful as when you do not have it. Last week we had no idea how passionately attached to the notion of democracy the people of Iraq would be, and many of us feared that somehow the insurgents in the Sunni Triangle and in Baghdad would scare the people away from voting. After all, these are no ordinary terrorists: their litany of evil has been the match of anything anywhere, in any of our lifetimes.
Innocence has been drowned in blood: hundreds of people, mostly Iraqi and other Arabs, have been beheaded, their last agonising minutes videoed and broadcast. Thousands more have been slaughtered, the purpose simple. Terrorism sought to terrorise by enlisting the imaginations of the people of Iraq in the service of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi. The latter's goons confidently handed out leaflets in Baghdad, promising that if people dared to vote, "blood would wash the streets". The Visible Victorious Brigades warned that they had taken an oath "to convert our bodies into bombs and burn all polling stations and everyone present in them, be they Americans, police or even you the voters. . .you will be responsible before God if you go to those filthy polling stations". Hala Jaba of the the Sunday Times reported that the Visible Victorious Brigades had 400 volunteers for suicide bombing in Baghdad alone, and that the police expected a death toll of 300 on election day - which, a police officer said, was acceptable, but he expected it to be far higher.
The Iraqis know the meaning of fear; they have been run by terrorists, thugs and gangsters since 1958. If any people could estimate the real value of the currency of terror, they could. Most commentators believed the elections were doomed because the Iraqis had placed a platinum price on violence - that it was a currency which still dominated the market-place. But as we now know, the coinage of terror had become utterly debased, and the Iraqi people simply refused to accept it as they walked in their millions to the polling booths.
The splendid, fearless Jack Fairweather, writing in this newspaper, quoted a polling centre manager in Baghdad, Talib Ibrahim, who had received a written death-threat for his role in advancing the cause of democracy. "This is the first step in one thousand miles towards freedom and stability," he said. "We want to send a message that, in spite of the violence, in spite of three wars Saddam put us through, we are an advanced people." If there has been ever such a public display of mass courage under the very noses of fascist terrorists by millions of Talib Ibrahims, the price of which could have been the murder of thousands of them, then I do not know of it. People earn freedom by taking it, not by it being given to them, and last Sunday, the men and the women of Iraq walked to their freedom. The Visible Victory Brigades became the Visibly Routed Brigades.
Had last Sunday's triumph involved South Africans or Alamaban blacks, the world's liberals would have been cheering them on; but because Iraqi democracy is the creation of US intervention, there has been a long, bitter hiss of baffled begrudgery.
Yes, you can put the gloss on the election that the Iraqis want the Americans out; but of course they do. They are the people of Mesopotamia, the land of Babylon, and they no more want strangers from half-way round the world running their ancient country than we want Afghans running ours. But the US presence is a temporary one, and President Bush's epochal inauguration speech is one of the turning points in world history.
US foreign policy doctrine is no longer about some son-of-a-bitch foreign leader being acceptable because he is our son of a bitch. All those realpolitik alignments with deranged dictators with mad stares who served the broader interests of US foreign policy will, one by one, be undone. And not just because they're wrong, but because they don't work. Their populations, especially in Arab countries, chafe with murderous resentment. They cause vast amounts of money to be squandered on internal security, whose ruthless application engenders further bitterness and creates more fundamentalists. The short-term fix becomes the long-term addiction, the means becomes the end.
Iraq is safest for the US when there are no US troops there. Those troops that are there at the moment have brought the seeds of freedom at the barrel of a gun, just as they similarly brought freedom to Europe from 1943 onwards. But this time there will be no Yaltas, no Tehrans, no more supping with devils because it suits the policy needs of the time.
No, I don't expect most people in Ireland to be relieved at the success of the Iraqi elections, or to feel pride at the unbelievable courage of Iraqis trooping through the dust of their battered cities to cast their ballots, and if need be, to die in the process. In Ireland, visceral anti-Americanism rules OK. Two-thirds of Irish people are opposed to US troops landing in Shannon en route for Iraq without UN authorisation, and even with authorisation, a majority is opposed to the Shannon halt. In effect, they prefer Saddam.
I take a slightly different line. I backed the US troops going into Iraq; and, better still, I will back them as they finally head homeward, mission accomplished, with peace growing in the country they helped make free, and at such a heavy price.