Who knows better: the Iraqi people or Spain's new PM?
By Janet Daley
(Filed: 17/03/2004)
dailytelegraph.com
Spain's new prime minister has said that the invasion of Iraq was a "disaster". A disaster for whom, exactly? According to a poll conducted by a collection of broadcasting organisations, including the BBC (which must have been rather startled by the results), a majority (57 per cent) of Iraq's population believe that life is better now that Saddam has gone. Just a shade under half (49 per cent) believe the invasion was right, as opposed to 39 per cent who think it was wrong.
Not only do they see their immediate situation as an improvement on life under the Ba'athist regime, but more than 70 per cent are optimistic about the future, stating that they expect their lives to be even better in a year's time. A still larger proportion of Iraqis (80 per cent) think that attacks on coalition forces are wrong and should stop. Fancy that.
Rather a different picture from the one that we get relayed to us here, isn't it? What we see of Iraq through the perspective of the anti-war media is a mess: a country that is scarcely a country at all, more a seething mass of chaotic hatred of America and its allies, in which the loathing of the entire populace constantly erupts into violence against the occupying troops (when, in fact, a majority want them to remain to help re-establish security) and repercusses through the wider world in the form of increased terrorism.
The not very subtle sub-text of much reporting on Iraq (see particularly most of the front pages of the Independent over recent months, and the idiosyncratic accounts of its star reporter, Robert Fisk) is that we have made things a lot worse for the Iraqis and a whole lot more dangerous for ourselves.
Huge swaths of the Guardian's comment pages, and endless hours of BBC coverage (generally involving the ubiquitous Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell) have been given over to reinforcing what has become the received opinion of the liberal intelligentsia: by bludgeoning our way into a region whose volatility we underestimated, either - choose your favourite calumny - because George W Bush and his friends were utterly cynical and interested only in stealing Iraqi oil, or because Bush and his friends were naively idealistic and thought they could bring US-style democratic freedom to Iraq overnight, we have reduced the country to ruination.
Only contrition followed by retreat can possibly repair the damage we have done. Now the newly elected Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has articulated this message as a threat: only a complete "revolution" in American policy could stop him from pulling out of the coalition that is occupying post-war Iraq.
To judge from the opinions of the Iraqi people themselves, this would be the most wickedly unhelpful and irresponsible thing that he could do. Now that the war is over, and Saddam gone, what the Iraqis want more than anything else, as 85 per cent of them say, is a return to security; to which end, they need the help of the occupying Western troops. But Mr Zapatero will presumably be happy only if the rest of the coalition joins him in a rapid exit and then submits itself to the terrifyingly ineffectual mechanisms of a UN "peace-keeping operation".
What could possibly be accomplished by pulling out now and leaving the Iraqis to the mercies of the minority who would like to see a return to Ba'athist tyranny, or failing that, enough chaos to provide cover for pan-Arabic terrorist organisations?
Well, one thing that would be accomplished would be a short-term, and utterly opportunistic, political gain for Mr Zapatero's party in Spain, and an apparent vindication for the anti-war party here. The next thing to happen would be the most almighty epidemic of global terrorism in history, since al-Qa'eda would have learnt the definitive lesson that mass murder works.
What is the lesson for those who truly believe in freedom for Iraqis and an end to the Islamic terrorist threat? That they must prosecute their case with far less ambivalence and apology. The anti-war lobby has not only misrepresented the state of Iraqi public opinion, but has also criminally manipulated British perceptions. It has managed to render a short, hugely successful and remarkably unbloody war that removed a genocidal tyrant into a matter for national shame.
To understand how damaging this might be, it is useful to look at a poll published in yesterday's Guardian which examines the feelings of British Muslims. Unlike their co-religionists in Iraq, Muslims living here do not feel kindly toward the liberators of that country. Nor, unlike Iraqis, do they feel optimistic about their own futures in the country where they reside.
They have come to believe that they are increasingly isolated in Britain and the poll seems to attribute this alienation directly to the Iraq war and anti-terrorism legislation. Fully 61 per cent of them believe that British and American troops should be pulled out of Iraq - which, you will remember, is precisely the opposite of what a majority of Iraqis want.
Why do British Muslims have such a contrary view of events from the very people about whom they are so concerned as to feel "isolated" in their own country? Perhaps because they, too, have been misled by the strident anti-war, anti-American lobby. Add to this that many of them have been inflamed, bullied and morally blackmailed by Islamicist demagogues who have been allowed to engage in hate speech and incitements to violence that would never be permitted to any other group in our society.
This misplaced "tolerance", which actively encourages mistrust and resentment between the races, is of a piece with the self-hatred peddled by the anti-war camp, for whom their own country, especially if it is in league with America, can do no right. Most British Muslims, like most Iraqis, want peace and freedom. Those who believe that they are delivering those things need to be as robust in their arguments as Osama's useful idiots are in theirs. |
