THE PROPHET IS NOT WITHOUT HONOR, EXCEPT IN HIS OWN LAND:

Mission accomplished, indeed (Jeff Jacoby, March 10, 2010, Boston Globe)

RONALD REAGAN liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn’t mind who got the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush’s presidency, and he probably doesn’t mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.

This week’s parliamentary elections in Iraq brought 12 million voters to the polls - a remarkable 62 percent turnout, notwithstanding a wave of Election Day bombings that killed 38 people.

“Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore,’’ a middle-aged voter named Maliq Bedawi told a New York Times reporter as they stood amid the rubble of a Baghdad apartment building destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. If anything, the jihadists’ violence only intensified the refusal of ordinary Iraqis to be intimidated. “Everyone went’’ to vote, Bedawi said. “Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.’’ [...]

[A]new Iraq is being fashioned - the Iraq Bush foretold in an address to the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, when he declared that “Iraqi democracy will succeed’’ and predicted that “the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.’’ Six years later - six years in which Iraq was convulsed by the bloody agony of sectarian terror, and in which 4,000 US military personnel were killed - that prophecy is coming to pass.