Pajamas Media has highlights from its excellent team of Iraqi bloggers who covered the election yesterday.

Ed Morrissey notices the NYTimes editorial page’s silence.

Turnout is estimated at 11 million. Now, the tallying begins:

Final results in Iraq’s parliamentary election may not be known for two weeks, but early indications show the Shiite tickets doing well in traditional Shiite strongholds, election officials said Friday.

In Mosul, capital of the predominantly Sunni Arab province of Nineveh, indications were that the Sunni coalition came in first, said a representative for the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, Hameed Shabaky.

He said the Shiite governing party apparently came in fourth behind the Sunni coalition, the Kurds and a bloc led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite…

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on “Lancing the Boil:”

For the last three years we have seen a carbuncle swell as the old Vietnam War opposition rematerialized, with Michael Moore, the Hollywood elite, and Cindy Sheehan scaring the daylights out of the Democratic establishment that either pandered to or triangulated around their crazy rhetoric. The size of the Islamicist/Baathist insurrection caught the United States for a time off guard, as was true also of the sudden vehement slurs from our erstwhile allies in Europe, Canada, and Asia. Few anticipated that the turmoil Iraq would force the Syrians out of Lebanon, the Libyans to give up their WMDs, and the Egyptians to hold elections — and that all the killing, acrimony, and furor over these developments would begin to engulf the Middle East and threaten the old order.

In the face of that growing ulcer of discontent, we quietly kept on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy. All that is finally lancing the boil, here and abroad — and what was in there all along is now slowly oozing out, making the cure seem almost as gross as the malady.

Publius Pundit Robert Mayer:

I do not want to seem premature in declaring this, like President Bush was when he declared victory aboard a naval carrier on May 1, 2003. But I will take that risk. December 15, 2005, will be seen as not only an historic election, but the day that combat operations really did begin to come to an end.

Jeff Harrell at Shape of Days has an eloquent essay: “When the sense of history overwhelms.”

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