The apparent landslide victory of "S.B.Y." (Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) in the Indonesian presidential election is promising. He has a reputation for getting things done; he has no time for Indonesia's Jihadis. He knows that free enterprise within a stable constitutional order is the way out of membership in the "Third World". And he says what he knows, with an uncommon boldness. He is intelligent and articulate (in English as well as Indonesian), and surrounded by advisers who are neither obsequious nor sanctimonious nor infamously corrupt.

Outgoing President Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of the country's founding dictator, had none of these qualities. She presided like a constitutional monarch. She is not an especially bad person, but in three years as the country's first fully freely-elected leader, proved frankly incompetent, dithering, obtuse. The margin of victory for the challenger in the run-off, at more than 60:40 (the full formal count will take some more days), gives the budding, huge Indonesian democracy a fresh start after several false ones.

As President Megawati's sometime security minister, S.B.Y. was the only cabinet member who said unambiguously that the terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah needs eliminating, not negotiating with. He was the only one who seemed to grasp that the endless underpublicized terror attacks on Indonesia's Christians were bad news not only for them, but for the whole country.

President-elect Yudhoyono wants to restore full military co-operation with the U.S. The leftist "human rights" gallery will hate him, as they hate all pro-Western generals; but this graduate of Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth stood up against corruption under the Suharto regime. He is clean, competent, and energized. From the U.S. point of view, his election might be considered the equivalent of one free, $500-billion invasion.