With the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president on Tuesday, Iraq will be put on notice to move rapidly towards self-sufficiency in security, so the new president can fulfil his electoral commitment to an early withdrawal of troops.
No sector has been more bitterly fought over than education, which recorded 31,600 violent attacks between the fall of Saddam Hussein and September 2007, including the assassination of 280 academics and the murder of dozens of students at a time in bombings at some of the country's top universities.
So while in most countries a 35 per cent drop in the pass rate of school-leaving examinations would be considered a disaster, in Iraq it is cause for celebration because it is a symbol of how the country is learning to tackle its own security problems.
'Last year 150,000 secondary students took the final examination, but we couldn't control the exam conditions,' said Alaa Makki, president of the Iraqi parliamentary education committee.
'Militias and armed groups entered the halls and killed students and some of the teachers observing the examinations. It was horrible. In other places they were deprived of the questions because people couldn't reach them.'
The exam chaos, combined with widespread corruption, resulted in an 85 per cent pass rate and produced an instant bottleneck in higher education, as 25,000 more students qualified for university than the 85,000 available places could accommodate.
The students couldn't find places in neighbouring countries, because Jordan and Syria refused to recognise the year's exam.