When it comes to the Iraqi election, Reuters are struggling to describe the cloud and in the process finds all sorts of tarnish on the silver lining. To mix metaphors, according to Reuters no end of rot on certain trees is more important than the fatc that the rest of the forest is in robust health.. Lots of words are spent mentioning thta the election officials originally said 72% of regular voters before backtracking and claiming that more than 60% did without mentioning that a 60% turnout would be considered good in any western democracy (other than those where voting is compulsory). The same goes for the mention of the 35 people killed bysuicide bombers. I hate to say this but elections in troubled places of the world such as Latin America or SE Asia (think East Timor) frequently see that level of election day casualties. Sure I would prefer to see 0 casualties but given the bloody threats by Zarqawi and his fellow scum this looks like a mercifully low body count.
The BBC likewise has trouble. In addtion to the Iraq report which pretty much follows the Reuters game (XXX good but YYY bad) and which has success in "scare" quotes as the headline, they also cover the expat voting in the UK. In Manchester it seems that the enemies of democracy tried to protest and a load of Iraqis took direct action against the protestors. Now I could be barking up the wrong tree but if (say) Belgium were having an election and some Dutch people tried to blockade expat Belgians from voting and the some of the Belgians were upset at this idea and attacked them, I suspect the BBC would look at things rather differently. But in something that looks to me like racism of the worst Kiplingesque imperial fashion, the BBC seems to be saying that Iraqis riot and therefore can't have "real" elections.
This attitude - that Arabs can't do democracy - is precisely the sort of thing I would expect from Kipling or others of his age. 100 years later though it isn't the imperialists who make this claim but "liberals" who are adamantly opposed to imerpialism even when it doesn't exist. Kipling is one of my favourite authors, but his attutude to non European races is at best patronising and paternalistic and frequently worse, however much of his writing rises far above such attitudes - attitudes which were shared by many (most?) of his contempories. The difference is that Kipling wrote when not only were such attitudes widespread but where the globe seemed to indicate their accuracy, people writing today that Iraqis or Afghanis or Ukrainians or whoever are not mature enough to handle democracy are not only writing after this 19th century theory has been disproven but are, in general, precisely the people who criticise Kipling et al. for their attitudes.
Robert Fisk of course managed to set the tone that has been followed by Reuters, the BBC and all the other nay sayers. It seems that for Fisk and friends the only conceivable way that an election in Iraq could be considered fair, free and genuine is if there were no foreign troops and no attacks by anti-democracy groups. Such a high bar would (as I noted above) seem to mean that India, the Philipines and Thailand to name but three countries are unsuitable for democracy. It would also nail places like Bolivia; a country which is arguably unsuitable for democracy although I doubt you could Fisk or Reuters to say anything of the sort. Of course Bolivia doesn't have US troops in it so it is sliding into partition and possibly civil war in precisely the way that Iraq isn't.
Fortunately Mark Steyn nails what they are missing and why it has indeed all gone horribly wrong - for the tyrants and those who desire stability. For those of us who think that change in the Middle East is a good thing, today's voting in Iraq shows that it has in fact all gone awefully right. In the old sense of the meaning of aweful that is - inspiring AWE