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Of course, the Americans have made grave mistakes in their occupation of Iraq. Following an invasion fought with clinical efficiency, there seemed to be no coherent plan for the reconstruction of the country. It is an indictment of some of the decisions made that, according to some estimates, 17,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. The treatment of some prisoners was a disgrace. The stated reason for going to war in the first place — that Saddam Hussein possessed large arsenals of weapons of mass destruction — has turned out to be a deceit, for which Mr Blair has failed so far to atone.
But no matter how it got there, Iraq is now a sovereign nation with a democratically elected assembly: a novelty in the Arab world. Moreover, the coalition forces are now in Iraq by invitation and nothing more. Of course Sunday’s vote was an ‘occupier’s election’ in the sense that the organisation of it was overseen by the Americans; but then so too were the first elections in postwar West Germany and in independent India. Who moans that they were illegitimate?
The Iraqi elections — which like last October’s first elections in Afghanistan failed to provoke the predicted bloodbath — are proof of President Bush’s belief that the most despotic of nations can and will embrace democracy if they are given the chance. And it is a chance which the Iraqis would not have been given had the UN been allowed to dictate the world’s dealings with Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqis have paid a heavy price for their liberation, a price many of them, given the chance, might frankly have elected not to pay. Coalition troops have been killed, and will continue to be killed, even if the casualty figures are nothing like those of the Vietnam war. As Andrew Gilligan reports, the insurgency will not easily die, and is causing chaos in the lives of Iraqi civilians. It would be wrong for the pro-war party to crow about any unalloyed triumph.
But it would be equally wrong for the anti-war party to speak of an unmitigated disaster or to hope (as many of them secretly do) for things to get worse, on the grounds that this would be a vindication of their visceral dislike of Bush, the neocons and indeed of modern America. The elections have gone surprisingly well. The heartbeat of hope is detectable in Baghdad, and it is beating more strongly since Sunday.
The toppling of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent construction of a democracy in Iraq marks a welcome departure from the laissez-faire approach to the world’s dictators. After Saddam, no brutal dictator can sleep safely in his presidential palace knowing that, so long as he doesn’t physically attack a Western nation, the world will leave him be in the misguided belief that Third World nations are destined forever to be governed by autocrats.
By turning out in such numbers, the Iraqis did not prove that they like the Americans, but they did prove that the will of the people to govern themselves is as strong in Baghdad as it is in London and Washington. It is a lesson for the appeasers of dictators everywhere.
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