72% Turnout!

The polls in Iraq are closed Leigh at A Western Heart has some numbers:

We'll start with the good news, from CNN:

Polls have closed in Iraq's first free election in a half century, with the independent election commission reporting a 72 percent turnout of registered voters nationwide by mid-afternoon amid attacks and threats of attacks to disrupt the vote. The commission's Adil Al-Lami and Safwat Rashid did not release figures for Iraq's largest province, al-Anbar -- west of Baghdad, including Falluja and Ramadi -- or the northwestern Nineveh province, which includes Mosul. "There has been a vast turnout in Iraq," Rashid said. "The news is freedom has won," Al-Lami said. "We have conquered terrorism."

Leigh then brings this into its true perspective:

72% of people voted? Remember that the highest voter turnout of the last 36 years in the United States brought out 60% of the eligible voting population.

Leigh mentioned starting with the good news. They follow this with an analysis of the moving target that blogger Andrew Sullivan presents when asked what would constitute a successful election. Complete with links pointing to several different numbers that Sullivan proposes. Leigh then closes with this wonderful observation:

But while the election created one big winner (the vast majority of the Iraqi people), it created a few losers in the media and the anti-Bush left. They claimed the Afghanistan elections would be delayed, and they were wrong. They claimed the Iraq elections either should or would be delayed, and they were wrong on both counts. They thought people wouldn't embrace democracy, and they were wrong. It doesn't leave many more places for the left to be wrong.

Writing on the walls guys... They want Democracy. They did not have it before but the Coalition went in there and gave it to them. We did the right thing...