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Antiwar camp routed

Melanie Phillips:

For the moment, they are routed. The grudging tones and surly looks of the anti-war camp, as they are obliged to comment through gritted teeth on the undiluted joy of the immensely brave and determined Iraqi people who have never in living memory been able to choose how they are governed, provides a shocking reminder of the moral sickness of the west. The anti-war camp is having to watch the awesome spectatcle of the assertion of the deepest human instinct for freedom -- an instinct they have done everything in their power to frustrate. At every stage of the Iraq war, they have talked down the enterprise, predicted dire outcomes, dwelt disprortionately on every setback and never reported the advances being made -- in short, mounted a propaganda assault based on lies in the service of defeatism and appeasement. In the process, they have given succour to the forces of darkness who have been stacking up the bodies of the murdered higher and higher against the incoming tide of freedom. But it didn't work. The Iraqis have pulled off their election against unprecedented odds and in the face of murderous violence. Their leaders have behaved throughout not just with astonishing bravery but with shrewdness, maturity and self-restraint.

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All we can do now is hold our breath, and hope. But we can be sure that the anti-war camp will be praying for the violence to intensify, praying for Iraq's fragile democracy to implode, praying for any setback to enable them to crow that Bush and Blair have failed. In the New York Times, Michael Ignatieff -- with whose analysis I do not entirely agree -- expresses proper disgust at such treachery:

'All this makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people is fascists'.