The Guardian's Comment and Analysis pages have carried some rank stuff over the last couple of years, but today's effort by Jonathan Steele takes some beating. It's aimed against what the subhead styles 'Iraq's illegitimate election'. The choicest part is not saved till last; it comes upfront:
If Iran qualifies as totalitarian [Steele is citing Condoleezza Rice] because it holds an election in which voters had only a limited choice, then the same is true of Iraq, where parties and movements which want an immediate end to the occupation were off the ballot.Steele here passes over the circumstance that if these parties and movements were off the ballot, it was because they boycotted the election. After that, it's a drip, drip, drip, designed to detract from the authenticity of the election as an expression of Iraqi opinion: some abstained but got their fingers inked 'in case the religious parties check on people in the street' (thus subtly suggesting that Iraqis were voting under intimidation - except not from those actually threatening to kill them if they did vote); next up, 'what matters is not who votes, but who counts'; then, 'most [of the international election monitors] stayed only a few minutes in the polling places they visited'. And so forth.
Still, this doesn't prevent the able journalist from doing a turn worthy of the young Wayne Rooney, and permitting himself also to use the ('illegitimate') election to the credit of the independent Iraqi people and the discredit of the two key politicians who led the war that opened the way to that election:
Embarrassed and humiliated that foreigners rather than Iraqis had toppled him [Saddam Hussein], they seemed proud that the election was an Iraqi show. I heard no one thanking Bush and Blair.But then our man Steele is back to business as usual. The election wasn't a 'defiance of terrorism'. No...
Most gave mundane reasons for their vote: patriotism, a sense of duty, concern over joblessness and power cuts, and the hope that the election might be a first step towards change. There was also a strong underlying feeling that having an elected government could hasten the restoration of sovereignty and an end to the occupation.What mundane reasons, hey! And nor do any of them contradict the defiance of terrorism that voting on that day in Iraq willy-nilly was. Then there's this, a piece of word play (subtly insinuate what you may not want to say too boldly) of particular weaseliness:
So this was certainly not an election which justified the invasion after the event...Got that? It's justification 'after the event'. As if democratization wasn't part of the regime change project from the start. Steele concludes:
TV images usually simplify, if not falsify, the story.Something Guardian journalists do not do. I normally take a bath or a shower in the morning before I post anything. Today I decided to post this first. You may be able to see why.
Update at 2.15 PM: See also Rob Hinkley, posting at The Daily Ablution.