The cynicism of the defeatists

William Shawcross rebukes Andrew Gilligan and Rod Liddle for their reflections last week on the war in Iraq

Isuppose it seemed a jolly jape to sandwich Michael Gove's criticism of the Daily Mail's anti-Americanism between Rod Liddle's and Andrew Gilligan's diatribes against the American-led policy in Iraq. Droll, but not very tasteful — like a slice of perfectly cooked rare beef between two pieces of stale bread and rancid mayonnaise.

I agree that there are immense problems in Iraq. Those who supported the overthrow of Saddam (as I did and still do) hoped the country would be further down the road towards a functioning, modern civil society by now. Instead, the antiCoalition violence has worsened seriously in the past three weeks.

The Coalition has made serious mistakes since it overthrew Saddam Hussein last April. One of the most serious was probably that the small army that was able to move so brilliantly fast on Baghdad was too small to police the country thereafter. But lamenting mistakes is one thing. Quite another is the cynicism and contempt displayed by both Gilligan and Liddle. Their desperate determination to establish that the overthrow of Saddam was a disaster is utterly unjust. Not to Bush and Blair, but to the vast majority of the 25 million Iraqis.

Liddle declares that claims about Saddam's WMD were 'a lie' by Blair and Bush. How so? Every major intelligence service in the world believed at the end of 2002 that Saddam was still pursuing his old dream of WMD. Saddam, unique among leaders of the time, had actually used WMD against both his neighbour (Iran) and his own people; by 2002 Iraq was in breach of 23 out of 27 obligations set by a decade of binding Security Council resolutions. The Council voted again unanimously in November 2002 that Saddam was still defying the world on WMD. We have not found the biological and chemical stockpiles we expected, but the interim report of the Iraq Survey Group has revealed further breaches of UN resolutions, and confirmed that he was building illegal long-range missiles and still hiding WMD programmes.

Liddle's most awful claim (which headlined his article) is that Iraqis were 'better off' under Saddam Hussein. He asserts that 14,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war began (he does not source this claim) and goes on to say that it is 'my guess' that that was more than Saddam would have killed in a year.

Why on earth would Mr Liddle want to make such an odiously casual 'guess'? Has he read anything at all about Saddam's rule or does he just not give a damn? Max Van der Stoel, the UN special rapporteur on human rights for Iraq, said that the brutality of the regime was 'so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the second world war'. Did Liddle see the thousands of bereaved people scrabbling in Saddam's mass graves this time a year ago? Did he care about the losses of their husbands, fathers, mothers, sons?

The numbers are obviously inexact. But the new Iraq Human Rights Centre in Kadhimiya has calculated that more than 70,000 people would have died in the past year if Saddam had still been in charge. Even if that is too high, Unicef argued that sanctions were killing 5,000 children a month. Liberation ended sanctions at once — so if Unicef is right, that would be 60,000 lives saved in the last 12 months, just for starters.

Gilligan and Liddle both ignore the nationwide poll conducted by Oxford Research for the BBC and published last month. This shows that 56 per cent of Iraqis think their lives are now better than before the invasion and that more than 70 per cent expect their lives to be a lot better in a year's time. Only 15 per cent wanted the Coalition troops to leave at once. That accords almost exactly with what Iraqis told me when I was there last month. People have many complaints about the Coalition — especially about inadequate security, too few jobs, inadequate services — but no one I met wanted to go back to the horrors of Saddam's rule. No one. 'The end of Saddam was like a dream,' one woman said to me.

The violence of the last three weeks is heartbreaking. But Gilligan's criticisms are of the Coalition, and particularly of the Americans — he appears much less interested in the brutal terrorists (the appropriate word) who murder Italian and American civilians and threaten or kill any Iraqi who hopes for a better future.

Amir Taheri, the Iranian-born author, recently argued that there are at present two hags — the real Iraq, where ordinary Iraqis are desperately trying to build a decent country, and the Iraq which people like Liddle and Gilligan (and others) want to use as an issue in American and domestic politics.

Glibly, Gilligan ignores the real effort made by both Iraqis and the Coalition to create the foundations of a civil society. The interim constitution adopted in March is the most progressive in the region, giving protection of basic human rights, freedom of the press and of religion. Every Iraqi I know is thrilled by it, particularly the women, though they fear it may not last.

There is violence and there is progress in Iraq. Most visitors understand that. Pace Gilligan and Liddle, most Iraqis are using their freedom well. From his privileged perch in Doughty Street, Liddle asserts, 'Right now, there is not the faintest glimmer that the Iraqis are clamouring for more secular democracy.' The truth, however, is that municipal elections have been held in 17 cities so far; according to Taheri they have all been won by democratic and secularist parties. There are now more children in school and university than at any time in the last 20 years. There is not yet enough clean water or electricity, but there is more in more places than under Saddam.

There are 200 newspapers in Iraq, instead of the few that mouthed the ghastly Saddamite lies a year ago. Iraq's Mafia-style command economy is history and foreign capital has been rushing into the country. Many Marsh Arabs are now moving back to their traditional rivers, which are being reflooded after Saddam drained them in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing.

The more progress, the more violence to stop it. Mario Vargas Llosa has written of 'the various sects and movements bent on provoking the Apocalypse in order to prevent Iraq from soon becoming a free and modern country .. . a perspective that rightfully terrifies and drives insane the gangs of murderers and torturers [of Saddam Hussein's rule] along with the fundamentalist commandoes from alQa'eda. . . . All of them, totalling only a few thousand armed fanatics, but with extraordinary tools for destruction, know that if Iraq becomes a modern democracy, their days are numbered.'

Vargas Llosa is right. How sad it is that two senior writers of The Spectator prefer to resort to meretricious, sneering commentary. The `trahison des clercs' is truly upon us.

William Shawcross's latest book is Allies: the United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq (Atlantic Books).