The words tell the story. President Bush spoke of an Iraqi voter “who had lost a leg in a terror attack last year, and went to the polls today, despite threats of violence. He said, ‘I would have crawled here if I had to. I don’t want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me. Today I am voting for peace.'” The Washington Post reported that crowds danced in the streets of Iraq, and that at one polling station, “a veiled, elderly woman kept repeating, ‘God’s blessings on you’ to election workers.” The Associated Press reported that “Entire families showed up in their finest clothes.” The New York Times reported, “there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.”

And the pictures tell the story. The Iraqi woman on our front page today triumphantly showing the dyed finger that proved she had voted. The 80-year-old man, also on our front page today, who was carried to the polls on the shoulders of another voter. The elderly woman above, who was pushed in a cart to a Baghdad polling place. They remind us of the inspiration we took last fall from the pictures of ballot boxes being carried on the backs of donkeys in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The words and pictures of yesterday’s election in Iraq tell the story of a remarkable achievement by the Iraqi people. It is an achievement that took place with the aid of America and its partners in the coalition that liberated Iraq. And in the face of the skepticism of a host of figures and institutions, on both the left and the right, in America and abroad.

Among the skeptics who may be feeling rather silly this morning are the editorialists of the New York Times, which in a January 12 editorial called for postponing the elections and predicted that they would be “the starting gun for a civil war.” Also, the syndicated columnist George Will, who condescended in his November 2003 Wriston lecture to the Manhattan Institute, “Iraq is just three people away from democracy – George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.”

Among those, in contrast, who must be feeling rather satisfied this morning are Ahmad Chalabi, whose vision and courage through long years in exile helped bring Iraqis to this day. And Paul Wolfowitz, who argued in the early days after September 11, 2001, that liberating Iraq had to be part of the response. Also, the American troops and those of our allies who risked their lives to make it possible for Iraqis to vote. And most of all, President Bush himself, whose steadfastness on fundamental principles was repaid 8-million-fold yesterday by Iraqi voters, young and old, who turned out to demonstrate that Mr. Bush was right when he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in New York: “I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty. I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man. I believe all these things because freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is the Almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in this world.”