Getting the Message Across

A spontaneous outpouring of curiosity at a speech in Philadelphia has led George W Bush to offer his thoughts on the total death toll in the Iraq war. Apart from the 2,140 who almost really matter, and the ninety-eight whose names it is illegal to mention near the Cenotaph, "thirty thousand have died more or less", as Bush movingly put it.

Meanwhile, as often happens in Iraq, somebody has carried out a poll. It makes heartening reading. "Nearly 71% of those questioned described their lives now as quite good or very good", while "just over half said life was better than before the war". This is certainly encouraging. A mere two and a half years after Mission Accomplished, and with only a few cities bombarded (albeit some more than once), Oxford Research International has found some people who think life has improved. A majority of respondents even think that life today is better than under the sanctions which preceded the war and which killed perhaps half a million children. It may be a slim majority; but, as Bush himself once pointed out, fifty per cent plus one is all you need. Bush even compared Iraq's politicians to the founding fathers of the United States, who also believed in government by the wealthy. "It's a remarkable transformation for a country that has virtually no experience with democracy and which is struggling to overcome the legacy of one of the worst tyrannies the world has known," he said. We must never forget that Saddam was a new Hitler, and that whatever one may say about the occupation, it still has not managed to kill quite so many people as Saddam.

This, obviously, is the reason why only a quarter of people interviewed by Oxford Research International wanted "an immediate troop withdrawal". Most would like us to depart once certain milestones have been reached; among them "the restoration of security" and "the development of Iraqi security forces capable of operating on their own", which presumably means we cannot leave until we have left or until we have built an Iraq more like Saddam's in the 1980s; or "the establishment of a new Iraqi government after Thursday's elections", which means we can leave on Friday. In choosing which milestone will signal the troops' departure, I trust that Bush and Blair will not allow their deference to the wishes of the Iraqi people to cloud their judgement overmuch. The country has, after all, virtually no experience with democracy. A slim majority even said that the invasion in 2003 was wrong. It may have been a majority, but of course it was only slim; and as Bush and his Supreme Court proved in 2000, the majority view is not always the correct one.