Feedback | 9 July 2005

The war will be won

It is nonsense to suggest, as Michael Wolff tried last week (‘The nation wobbles’, 2 July), that the war in Iraq is almost lost.

Terrorists are certainly doing their best to destroy the hopes of Iraq. But the resistance to them is strong. Mr Wolff dismisses the fact that eight million people defied the terrorists in January to vote as merely a ‘high moment of triumphalism’. So much for the freest election ever held in the Arab world.

He claims that the Sunni 30 per cent of the country who did not vote are now ‘supporting an insurgency against both the occupiers and the rest of the nation’. That is untrue. The Sunnis are split. Some have sided with the Sunni terrorists who want to murder the Shia majority of Iraq. Mainstream Sunni leaders have regretted that they did not take part in the election and have asked for fatwas from their clerics instructing Sunnis to vote next time.