Dan Calabrese

In case you didn’t notice, the weekend brought us another example that the U.S. mission in Iraq has succeeded.

No one will know for awhile what form the next government of Iraq will take. No one would claim the situation there is perfect when 36 people died as a result of attacks designed to undermine the weekend’s elections.

More vindication.

And no one would be so foolish as to claim the Iraqis don’t have a lot of work ahead of them to make their fledgling democracy work.

But let’s not miss the stunning reality of what happened in Iraq last week, and in fact, what has been happening there for the past three years.

Iraq is functioning quite smoothly as a representative democracy, which is not to say representative democracies are typically all that smooth.

Many parties field many candidates on complicated ballots. No one party wins a majority, and coalitions must be cobbled together in order to form a government. This is not all that different from the way it works in Italy or Austria. This is democracy at its core.

And with as much as 60 percent of the electorate having turned out for the latest vote, no one can deny that the Iraqi people have fully embraced the process and its legitimacy.

With every free and successful Iraqi election that comes and goes, it becomes more difficult for critics of the Iraq War to claim – as they were so fond of doing around 2005 and 2006 – that the Iraq invasion was the greatest foreign policy blunder of all time, or a fiasco, or a boon to Iran, or a recruiting godsend for Al Qaeda . . . you get the idea.

During the post-invasion insurgency, war critics were fond of saying that the insurgency had the popular support of the Iraqi people, who hated the idea of the United States occupying its country. They made this claim, in spite of the fact that the Iraqi people overwhelmingly approved the constitution that has set the stage for the elections that have followed, and in spite of the massive turnouts that have accompanied these elections.

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The whole Iraq-as-fiasco storyline, of course, was intended solely for the purpose of creating political problems for George W. Bush. The objective of transforming Iraq from a Middle East strongman/tyranny to a constitutional democracy was never going to be achieved without a struggle. Perhaps the Bush team underestimated the difficulty of the struggle as well, but to their credit, they stood strong and prevailed over it when just about everyone on Earth was demanding that they retreat.

Few remember now that, when Democrats took control of Congress after the 2006 elections, they vowed to end the war by cutting off funding for it. They were not able to do so because Bush – with his approval rating in the tank and his political capital seemingly at an all-time low – prevailed over them not only to continue funding the effort, but also to go along with the troop surge that ultimately led to victory in the conflict.

Even some of the decisions long ago derided as blunders, such as Paul Bremer’s decision to ban Saddam-aligned Sunnis from government, now don’t look so bad as entirely new leaders have stepped forward to fill the gap.

Iraq was always going to be a long-term challenge, as you might expect considering the radical nature of the transformation that was being attempted. But with every passing month, as the violence wanes and democratic institutions take hold, Bush’s decisions to invade and to stay committed to the effort are all the more vindicated.

One of the remaining arguments of the Iraq-as-Disaster crowd is that Iran is influencing Iraq’s elections. But they make this claim before every election, and the election result never bears it out. This time, predictably, the Iran-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council appears to be getting far less support than many had predicted. Meanwhile, Iran’s regime continues to grapple with a popular democracy movement no doubt influenced by what has happened in Iraq.

Who’s influencing whom?

Democracy in Iraq, as it strengthens, will become an increasingly important strategic opportunity for the United States. This is not to say it would be a good idea, as some have disingenuously claimed Bush wanted, to “impose democracy at the barrel of a gun” all across the globe.

The United States “imposed” democracy on two countries during the Bush presidency, which is to say we gave the people of two countries the opportunity to choose it. One was Afghanistan, which we attacked because the Taliban was harboring the perpetrators of 9/11. The other was Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was in violation of the terms of the Gulf War cease fire in regard to documenting the destruction of his weapons, and it was Saddam’s responsibility to prove he got rid of them. It was never our responsibility to “find” them.

The U.S. will surely not traipse across the globe invading every country where it would like to see democracy, particularly under the Obama Administration. But this was never Bush’s intention either. He merely sought to support democratic movements wherever possible, recognizing that democratic nations do not threaten their neighbors, make for good trading partners and help stabilize the security of the entire globe.

So, with every passing day, we see that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq – and to stay the course there when most were demanding he retreat – represented one of the great foreign policy triumphs of recent times.

Now we just have to pray that Bush’s successors don’t squander the achievement.

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