Coalition of the whining still wrong on Iraq

Editorial: Coalition of the whining still wrong on Iraq

APRIL 2003 was a great month for those who believed the people of Iraq should be freed from the grip of tyranny, and that if they were it would make the world a safer place. April 2004 has so far been a great month for those who believed they shouldn't, and that it wouldn't.

In the former camp are the governments of the US, Britain, Australia, Poland and the other nations who form the coalition of the willing - along with the majority of Iraqis, who still tell pollsters their lives are better now than under Saddam Hussein. In the latter group are the radical Shi'ite and Sunni factions, Baathist holdouts and al-Qa'ida blow-ins seeking with violence to undermine the transition to democracy - along with all the commentators and intellectuals in the West who opposed the original invasion on the curious principle that anything the US does must be wrong. The undercurrent of whining we heard from the Left in April 2003, as Saddam's statue fell and Iraqis cheered, has this month begun to sound like a victory anthem, as Fallujah burned and Najaf simmered.

Too soon - far too soon. It is quite true that the first half of April, in which hundreds of Iraqis and nearly 100 Americans were killed in fighting, while hostages were taken and one of them murdered by radical militias, has been the bloodiest and least successful period of the occupation so far. But a negotiated settlement to the siege of Fallujah is in progress, while in Najaf the murderous radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has failed to ignite the popular uprising he urged among Shi'ites. Admittedly these are modest signs of progress towards stability and security, but what is most encouraging is that they have been effected by Iraqis themselves. It was members of the Iraqi Governing Council who brokered a ceasefire in Fallujah. And as revealed in a report by Peter Wilson in The Weekend Australian, al-Sadr's most dogged enemy is not US administrator Paul Bremmer but an Iraqi judge called Raid Juhy, who has painstakingly assembled a brief against the renegade cleric that includes the murder of rival cleric Abdul Majeed al-Khoei, along with theft and numerous other serious charges. The handover of sovereignty on June 30, which is what the radical factions and terror cells hope to derail, is proceeding.

This did not stop anti-US journalist Robert Fisk gleefully telling Tony Jones on ABC TV's Lateline on Monday night - in a bizarre echo of the line heard from al-Sadr and his cohorts - that "the handover is basically a fraud" because the interim government will be chosen by the US. Well, we don't know that yet, and it is in any case established that there must be free elections in Iraq by January 2005. Fisk lauded the rag-bag of extremists and terrorists making trouble in Iraq as an "anti-American resistance". Unchallenged, he pointedly referred to the four US contractors brutally murdered in Fallujah as "mercenaries". He nonsensically compared the occupation of Iraq with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - because they are both about "two occupying forces coming up against unstoppable opposition" - and in a stunning piece of moral relativism equated both with the French occupation of Algeria. It seems the US, which has precious little history of empire-building, cannot even remain in a country long enough to set up a democracy without facing the same old accusations of imperialism.

Fisk's local soul-mates have taken The Australian to task for editorialising triumphantly on the fall of Saddam, and for debunking those who claimed Iraq would turn into a quagmire and an intifada. For the record, it was claims the invasion would take months or years, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, that we debunked. And equally for the record, our opinion page has carried a wider range of anti-war material than rival papers. Our editorial the day after Saddam's statue toppled began "Now for the hard part", and three days later we warned that a "period of disorder" in Iraq was inevitable. It is true we did not get everything right. Neither has the US administration in Iraq, which has chopped and changed far too often, and left it too late to tell the world what sort of government will assume authority on June 30. But the noise of bombs and curfew sirens has only muffled, not stilled, the other sounds we were already hearing in Iraq: of people saying and writing whatever they pleased in 250 new newspapers and magazines, of the satellite televisions that a third of Iraqi households now own, and of oil flowing again at pre-war levels, generating nearly $20 billion this year alone for the Iraqi people. Meanwhile the predicted eruption of the "Arab street" has not eventuated, and countries such as Iran, Libya and even Saudi Arabia have become more biddable than before, both towards the West and towards internal democratic elements. The wheel's still in spin, and nobody should be celebrating anything just yet, but we remain proud of what this country and its allies have done in Iraq.