There are some bombs going off, but apart from that the election in Iraq on March 7 is a model of its kind.
There are more than 6000 candidates for the 352 seats in parliament, and the country is flooded with foreign observers monitoring the process.
Unlike last time, no major group is boycotting the election and nobody knows who is going to win it.
Iraq has come a long way since the Sunni-Shia civil war of 2005-07, when 3000 murdered people were being found in Baghdad each month. True, the most violent elements just could be waiting until all the Americans leave next year to start the fighting again, but it's unlikely they would let this election unfold smoothly if they had the power to disrupt it. And the more credible the election, the greater the legitimacy of the resulting government.
It could be literally a new government, in the sense that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would no longer be running it. Maliki's personal popularity among more nationalist Shias (less sectarian ones) is undiminished, and his State of Law alliance leads in the opinion polls, with a predicted 30 per cent of the seats in the new parliament. But 30 per cent is not a majority.
To form a new government, Maliki's party will need the support of either the secular nationalists of former prime minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Movement, now at 22 per cent in the polls, or of the conservative Shia religious party, the Iraqi National Alliance, which has 17 per cent. They have both said that they will not accept Maliki as prime minister in any coalition government they join, and they may actually mean it.
But how nice it is to make such boring, routine calculations about the outcome of an Iraqi election. It's almost as if the place has become a normal country again, and a democratic one at that. Iraqis certainly deserve a happy ending after all the horrors they have been through. Are they really going to get one?
Al-Qaeda, which gained a foothold among the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, retains the ability to commit atrocities like the suicide bombings that killed 32 people in Baquba on Wednesday - but it is now only a marginal force among the Sunnis. The question is whether the community has accepted its minority status and decided to make the best of it.
The Sunnis dominated Iraqi politics for centuries, and 10 years ago most did not even realise that the Shias outnumbered them three to one. The US invasion drove them from power, they bore the brunt of the fight against the US occupation, and then they were dragged into a war against the Shias by the al-Qaeda fanatics.
In the course of that war most mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad were cleansed of their Sunni population, and the city is now overwhelmingly Shia. A very large proportion of the 2 million Iraqi refugees abroad and the 2 million internally displaced people are Sunnis. Even in this election, the Shia-dominated de-Baathification committee disqualified a number of prominent Sunni candidates from running.
Yet most Sunnis will be voting this time, rather than boycotting the election as they did in 2005. In retrospect the Sunni community sees that as a grave error, as they had almost no influence on central government policy.
The wounds in Iraq are fresh, and its democracy is still new and fragile. It would be nice if Iraq had something positive to show for its long ordeal.
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