With Iraq election over, Blair now fighting to win his own
By DIANE ROBERTS
Published February 5, 2005
LONDON - The day after the elections, the Guardian newspaper ran this cartoon of a coalition soldier cheerfully asking an Iraqi guy: "What's it like, voting? I never bothered."
Best estimates put Iraqi turnout at around 60 percent. In the 2004 American presidential contest it was 59 percent, and in Britain's last general election, it was 60 percent. As one British editorial put it, for a people who've never held a free plebiscite before, the Iraqis are on their way to putting us to shame. And in the "mature democracies," nobody threatens to blow you up or cut off your head merely for going to the polls.
Unlike the United States, which only started seriously fooling with Iraq when Donald Rumsfeld went to sell arms to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, Britain has long been entangled with the place. They first invaded it in 1916. With an estimated half-million people of Iraqi origin living in the United Kingdom, Iraq isn't this far-off desert world, it's part of the old imperial sphere of influence. In a political sense, the British created Iraq, as they did the modern states of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Arabic here is about as exotic as Spanish in Miami.
Consequently, British coverage of the elections ad a strange sort of intimacy to it. BBC radio's Arabic Service alone had reporters filing from a more than dozen Iraqi cities from Mosul down to Basra.
The British themselves go to the polls in May. Iraq will be central to Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign, and the press knows it. So the media here are displaying some not-always-characteristic nuance, giving space to a multiplicity of voices. For example, Robin Cook, Blair's former foreign secretary and an opponent of the invasion of Iraq, welcomed the elections on the BBC and called for a "change of direction so radical that it is seen by Iraqis as a new strategy and not as a continuation of the failed approach of the past two years."
The Daily Telegraph newspaper, pro-Iraq invasion though anti-Blair, pointed out that the very presence of candidates "virulently opposed to the presence of American and British troops" justified the elections and proved they were essentially fair. The Independent newspaper, anti-Iraq invasion though (reluctantly) pro-Blair, thundered that elections with Bradley fighting vehicles in the streets, armed guards at polling places, and international observers miles away in Amman, were "far from being free and fair." Still, "this election is the only hope for the Iraqi people."
One of the most intriguing voices belonged to Houzan Mahmoud, U.K. head of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. A refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime, she refused to vote, citing the "lack of interest in women's issues" from the 111 parties running. The elections are "little more than a cruel joke" for Iraqi women, who, ironically, were once the freest in the Arab world. Women are now scared to go to college, scared to work, scared to venture out of the house except under an inhibiting veil.
Nobody, not even London's notorious tabloids, exhibited the kind of brain-dead boosterism of, say, Fox News. No matter that at least 44 people died on election day, Oliver North, that well-known champion of transparency and the rule of law, appeared on the "fair and balanced" network barking, "What a great day for America and a great day for freedom!"
Nobody in the British government, with one exception, pretended that Iraq will soon be transformed. That one exception is, of course, Tony Blair, sounding eerily just like George W. Bush in claiming that the Iraqi elections struck "a blow right to the heart of global terrorism."
Bush can throw around a lot of nonsense about how terrorists cannot operate in a democracy (this would be news to the IRA, the KKK, the Red Brigades, and the Basque separatists, all of whom flourished in free societies): He isn't up for re-election. But Blair has to convince British voters that the Iraq war, WMDs or no WMDs, was a Good Idea. Blair has to hope that the Iraqi insurgency goes quiet. And that, with their "special friendship," he alone might be able to pry Bush away from the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz school of bomb-'em-till-they-behave, maybe even achieving a diplomatic solution to the small matter of Iranian nukes.
The press will be watching. This time, Blair can't afford to appear in editorial cartoons as "Bush's poodle," on all fours with a bow on his head.
Diane Roberts is the author of Dream State, a book about Florida.