Look beyond the jockeying for jobs in Iraq's embryonic transitional government. Focus instead on the final results in that Arab country's matrix-breaking election. They reveal a little-publicized result that President Bush, feminist organizations and democracy advocates should be shouting from the rooftops.

Nearly one-third of the 140 winning candidates on the Shiite parliamentary list are women. Moreover, those 45 women from the list supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tend to be more educated, better informed and more committed to change than are their male counterparts, who include a number of political hacks.

Bush has been in Europe this week emphasizing the overall importance of the Jan. 30 elections and his commitment to transforming the autocracies of the Middle East and Central Asia into a zone of peaceful democracies.

But the president's failure thus far to highlight the success of women in the elections -- 31 percent of Iraq's newly elected 275 parliamentarians are women -- suggests that not even he fully appreciates the forces of change that he may have unleashed by toppling dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nor do gender liberationists in the West seem eager to publicize this stunning result. Could they not want to accept even implicitly the notion that war can create the conditions needed for a positive social revolution?

That revolution ultimately is even more important to transforming the Middle East than is U.S. military might or European diplomacy. There will be no democracy in the greater Middle East until women break through the crippling restrictions and humiliations imposed on them by Arab cultural chauvinism and widespread, if perverse, interpretations of Islamic faith...