Here's a story you don't see very often: Iraq's highest court told the Iraqi parliament last week that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime.

That's not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals defending al-Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and press freedom. I can't imagine any other Arab country where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel – and where intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

In the case of Iraq, the high court, in a unanimous decision, vacated the parliament's rescinding of Alusi's immunity. The decision explained that although a 1950s-era law made traveling to Israel a crime punishable by death, Iraq's new constitution establishes freedom to travel. Therefore the parliament's move was "illegal and unconstitutional," Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for the court, told the Associated Press. The judgment even made the parliament speaker responsible for the expenses of the court and the defense counsel.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Iraq to have relations with Israel anytime soon, but the fact that it may be developing an independent judiciary is good news. It's a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and the rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. And it's a reminder that a decent outcome may still be possible in Iraq.

If Iraq can keep improving and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.

How so? Iraq is a geopolitical space that for the last three decades of the 20th century was dominated by a Baathist dictatorship – which, though it provided a bulwark against Iranian expansion, did so at the cost of a regime that murdered tens of thousands of its own people and attacked three of its neighbors.

In 2003, the United States, under President George W. Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by al-Qaida to provoke a SunniShiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against proIranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance that a reasonably stable democratizing government can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I'm sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did – that he'll wait forever for them to sort out their politics – while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party's national security credentials than that.