As his last year begins, Blair still
hasn’t got the hang of democracy Rod Liddle says that the Prime Minister’s Christmas jaunt to the Middle East epitomised his confusion about what happens when people who hate you get the chance to say so in elections As our Prime Minister is someone whose confused political instincts stretch little further than a belief in democracy and freedom of choice, it is heartening to enter a new year knowing that he is, if anything, even more deeply committed to such fundamental but fragile and tenuous — concepts.
On his annual Christmas trip, in a onehorse sleigh, to the Middle East, Tony Blair insisted that the Palestinian people be afforded another general election as soon as possible. This is a commitment to the democratic principle which easily exceeds my own. The Palestinian people had an election only 11 months ago, you see; I would have thought they could wait a few years before having another one. But our Prime Minister, resolutely democratic as ever, thinks that they should have another one now — and then another one after that and another one after that, perhaps. Until they get the right result. Let’s recall what happened in Palestine on 25 January this year. Unexpectedly, if you are Mr Blair (or Mr Steyn or Mr Shawcross, for that matter), Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats up for grabs, plus another four by proxy. It was, everyone concluded, a remarkably fair election, wholly lacking those familiar Middle Eastern electoral appurtenances of cheating, violence, fraud and intimidation. But still, Blair thinks they should have another go at it.
A couple of years previously there was an election in Afghanistan. The result was a victory for Mr Hamid Karzai. At the time, Tony Blair congratulated ‘the people of Afghanistan for turning out in such numbers’. He had a point. They turned out in quite remarkable numbers. Indeed, the number of voters seemed to exceed the number of people in the country. One chap in Kabul voted a hundred times. Not everyone in the country was impressed by this rapacious hunger for the democratic ideal. For example, every one of the 15 opposition candidates called for a boycott of the poll, arguing that it had been gerrymandered and was wholly fraudulent. Not that this bothered the West. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) sent a mission to the country shortly before the election which concluded that the OSCE shouldn’t monitor the election ‘because it might uncover substantial flaws and challenge public and international confidence in the process’. And so, as the Prime Minister averred, the Afghan people turned out in great numbers, unmonitored — and luckily they got the right result.
Mr Blair’s statements from Israel and Palestine over the festive period were interesting because they marked a subtle, nuanced shift in the warp and weft of his historic commitment to global democracy. Shortly before Christmas he explained that there were two sorts of people, those who wanted to live in peace with their neighbours and those who didn’t. The West would work with the former but not the latter, he announced (a little presumptuously). This is a step forward, I suppose, from his previous standpoint, which insisted that everybody in the Middle East would like to live in a peaceable consensus with both Israel and the West, if only they were given the chance to do so.
It was this standpoint which led to the invasion of Iraq and the notion that if only Saddam were removed, the people of Iraq would unite in their commitment to Western-friendly liberal democracy, even if it were liberal democracy with a vaguely Islamic tinge. That fatuous, hopelessly mistaken notion has now been not only buried, but buried, dug up again and the bones burned and scattered on the nearest available waters. Whereas once the neocons insisted that a germ of democracy was spreading through the Middle East, now they are silent — for every successive election in Middle Eastern countries has shown that the people of the region want precisely the opposite to what the Western politicians want them to want. In Iran, Ahmadinejad (nukes! Death to Israel! Hang the apostates!) won with a popular vote of 61 per cent of the electorate. In Palestine the victors were Hamas. Unless the election is gerrymandered, as in Afghanistan and Egypt (the most popular group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was debarred from standing), the people of the Middle East will always vote for those organisations which are most intransigent and vindictive in their opposition to the West and to Israel. There are one or two conclusions one might draw from this.
Firstly, that you cannot have it both ways. You are either for democracy or against democracy; you cannot be for it only when the side you want to win actually wins — do that and you convince every voter in the Middle East that democracy is merely a cunning means to an end. Likewise, if you are truly for democracy, you baulk when the process is subverted, even when it favours your side, as in Afghanistan.
Secondly — and it is bizarre that this has not already occurred to our Prime Minister — the people of the Middle East do not like us very much. The greater our involvement in their affairs, the more they will kick against it and support organisations antithetical to our aims. All the more so if that involvement requires the use of tanks and bombs, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even without that they will be suspicious of any indigenous organisation or political party which has the support of the leaders of the Western world — and may, as a result, transfer their support to rather more radical political opponents. If the call for a new election in Palestine from Fatah was not dodgy enough for the people of that country, then the support given to that call by Tony Blair immediately made it so. ‘But we already voted,’ they will say. ‘What exactly is your problem?’ In the year that followed the invasion of Iraq, those of us who suggested that Iraqis had been better off under the murderous Saddam Hussein were regarded as lunatics, quite beyond the pale. And yet these days even the Secretary-General of the United Nations concurs with this formerly disreputable thesis — and our own Prime Minister accepts that the war has been a ‘disaster’. Such acceptance is welcome, even if, astonishingly, Blair takes no responsibility for the disaster and offers nothing in the way of regret. But you might at least expect him to have understood that Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran and so on are not simply cases of countries where a liberal-minded population is restrained by a despotic and authoritarian leadership. They are countries where the people think very differently to us and disagree with us about almost everything. And another election in Palestine won’t change that.
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