Opinion Journal:
The world won't know for a week or longer which candidates won yesterday's historic Iraq elections, but we already know the losers: The insurgents. The millions of Iraqis who defied threats and suicide bombers to cast a ballot yesterday showed once and for all that the killers do not represent some broad "nationalist" resistance.
The true Iraqi patriots are those who risked their lives to vote, apparently in much larger numbers than anticipated. "I would have crawled here if I had to," 32-year-old Samir Hassan, who lost a leg in a car-bomb blast last year, told Reuters. "I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me." Yesterday's coverage on TV and in print was full of similar comments from Iraqis--which is especially notable since so much of the Western press has been anticipating a much worse outcome. (See today's Wall Street Journal for an Iraqi blogger's eye-witness account.)
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The result is also a credit to the American and Coalition forces who provided security, at the painful cost of more lives. Protecting 5,000 polling places was a monumental task, and it is significant that terrorist attacks were largely unsuccessful. In the Shiite-dominated south and the Kurdish north, the voting took place with little violence. And even in such restive Sunni areas as Mosul and Baquba, turnout was notable. If other Sunni areas didn't vote in large numbers, the reason was as much insurgent intimidation as any general boycott.
The election shows that most of Iraq is not in "chaos" and that the insurgents remain an unpopular minority rejected by most Iraqis. In the days before the vote, in fact, three more key members of the terror network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were rounded up, following the recent capture of a major deputy.
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