Can Iraq make it?

Baghdad

The election-night special on Iraqi TV, rather like the election itself, bore little resemblance to anything that British viewers might be familiar with. There were few candidates to interview (too scared), no counts to visit (too slow), and a merciful lack of macho electoral clichés. In Iraq, the terms ‘battleground seat,’ ‘war room’ and ‘political annihilation’ are not the concoctions of spin-doctors in suits trying to sound tough. They are all too horribly real.

The Iraqi Dimblebys might not have had any exit polls to talk about — would you want to stand outside a polling station all day with a clipboard in this country? — but they did have suicide-bomb polls. In the absence of actual results or a reliable turnout figure, the main measure of the elections’ success or failure so far has been the number of voters blown up. ‘A remarkably low tally of deaths in the central Baghdad area,’ said Al-Iraqiya’s Anthony King equivalent, thoughtfully, at one point during the coverage, as if talking about vote-switching of target C2 electors in key Home Counties swing seats.