Adrian Blomfield went to
Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks
that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of
the White House
The other day, shortly after returning from a longish stint in
Iraq on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, I had dinner with a staunch
Republican friend at a restaurant here. I was expecting a stern
rebuke, and she did not disappoint. ‘I thought you were fairly
unbiased,’ she said. ‘Yet your stories became increasingly focused
on the attacks. Why didn’t you write about the good things, about
how Americans troops are building schools and restoring services?’
Many of those intending to vote for President Bush next week
would share my chum’s frustrations. They believe there is a
conspiracy, perpetrated by the undoubtedly liberal-dominated press,
to bury the good news and report only on the bad in an effort to
make sure he is not re-elected.
Do they have a point? The difference between the despondency of
media reports from Iraq and the optimism of the press releases put
out by US military command in Baghdad certainly could not be
starker.
My inbox is filled with emails from a Sgt Steve Valley at the
Coalition Press Information Center bearing cheery headlines such as
‘Iraqi Children Get a Kick out of Donation’, ‘Winning Hearts by
Filling Stomachs’ and ‘Another Precision Strike in Fallujah’. Sgt
Valley, who signs off his emails with the words ‘Cowboy Up’,
recounts heart-warming tales of brave American soldiers handing out
soccer balls to children, delivering food to poor mothers and
rebuilding schools, clinics and playgrounds. The interim Iraqi
government sees things Sgt Valley’s way. Addressing a joint session
of Congress in September, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was profuse in
his praise of the US-led invasion and announced that, while there
were a few problems in three of Iraq’s provinces, things were pretty
much hunky-dory in the other 15.
Yet the Western press is daily filled with disheartening stories
of suicide bombings, allegations of American bungling and the
denouncements of furious Iraqis. Our television screens show grim
images of dust-covered children being pulled out of the rubble after
raids in Fallujah, or panicked civilians fleeing the latest suicide
bombing in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqubah or a host of other towns and
cities.
As we all know, bad news sells papers. Most foreign
correspondents lean left and some may even twist the truth,
especially if they think that by doing so they may lose Mr Bush the
election. Indeed, there are a few reporters in Baghdad who do greet
each atrocity with unbecoming glee for that very reason, as my
colleague Toby Harnden reported in these pages in May. But the
majority of journalists do not, I believe, put a liberal spin on
their reporting, if only because there is no real need to. The
situation in Iraq, despite what the military command and government
would have you believe, is unrelentingly grim — if not everywhere,
then at least in a large proportion of the country.
Before I flew into Iraq in early June, I — like the editor of
this magazine — was uneasy about what was happening, but believed
the war to be right. As someone born and raised in Africa, the issue
for me was not so much whether Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction (though I assumed the British and American governments
knew something they weren’t telling us) but whether the country was
better off without him. I wasn’t convinced that the Iraqi regime had
much to do with al-Qa’eda, and accepted that an invasion would be a
diversion from the real war on terror. But I did savour the words
‘regime change’.
For far too long Western countries have sat back or even lent a
hand as African dictators imprisoned, tortured and murdered their
opponents. During the Cold War, Washington and London pumped in
money to support venal regimes like those of Mobutu Sese-Seko in
Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Idi Amin in Uganda and
even our own Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. So the idea of a dictator
getting his comeuppance rather than retiring to a villa in the Côte
d’Azur was appealing. I was not quite so naive as to assume that the
American and British navies would soon be steaming into the Indian
Ocean to prepare for an assault on Robert Mugabe. But I did think
that it would be harder to ignore the excesses of such men without
being accused of hypocrisy.
