So I've been sitting and reading and thinking about the outcomes of the Iraqi election - hesitant to jump up and down in part because I was too enthusiastic about the elections before.

But after two weeks of watching the news and reading analysis from everyone from Michael Yon to Juan Cole, I've got to stop for a moment and talk about what a wonderful thing it is that Iraq has a politics, and more, that it's emerging as a national politics.

The cast of parties and characters in Iraqi politics is as complex as family lines in a Tolstoy novel. While I look at them and listen to those who try and understand the shifting alliances at the heart of Iraqi politics, I won't pretend at this point to be able to predict much about the political outcomes - and I'm skeptical of anyone right now who claims they can.

But I can put a stake in the ground and say one thing; that we're seeing the emergence of a genuine Iraqi politics, and that the center of focus has shifted from the balance of militia power to the balance of political power, from bullets to ballots as they say.

The politics aren't necessarily what we wish they were - but they are what the Iraqi people are choosing, and that's about as good as it gets.

The reality is that there is emerging a central Iraqi government with enough authority to, among other things, negotiate its own term for engagement with the US. And the reality is that what we need to do is negotiate our engagement with them in light of their and our best interests.

The problem is that we are likely to negotiate our engagement in light of our domestic political conflicts; that we'll choose an Iraq policy based on backward-looking score settling between the pro- and anti-war factions in our own politics.

So far,Obama seems to be avoiding that path, and as a consequence I think we'll see slow walking and sad talking on the part of a lot of the antiwar commentariat. As well as from the folks who think we need a wider war.

But as long as individual Iraqis lives are getting better...(and the indicators suggest that's true):

BAGHDAD (1/9/09)-- While Americans have been watching the value of their homes plunge in recent months, residents of the Iraqi capital find themselves in the exact opposite situation, with long depressed housing prices skyrocketing to levels that are now out of reach for most residents.

For those who were forced to give up their homes during the worst days of sectarian violence that wracked the country in 2006, the current boom in housing prices is especially painful.

Mohammad Sadun, 59, a worker at the Ministry of Transportation, sold his house in the al-Doura district in 2006 for about $34,000.

"I felt al-Doura would never come back to life again and that the insurgents would control it forever," he said.

His former house is worth about $128,000 on today's market.

...I can live with a pretty high level of domestic discontent.