THOSE NEO-CONS POP UP IN THE STRANGEST PLACES

Democracy is bad news for terrorists (Janet Daley, The Telegraph, February 2nd, 2005)

An understandably bitter little missive was posted on the headhackers' website on Monday. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wanted the world to know that the elections in Iraq were not going to slow him down. The cause of terrorism was not daunted. In bloodcurdling terms, he swore vengeance on those who had had the temerity to ask the Iraqi people how they would like to be governed: "Let Bush and Blair know that we are the enemies of democracy."

Fair enough. We may as well all lay our cards on the table. Democracy is certainly out to get Zarqawi - and this is a fight to the death. You might think it an unequal battle: that democracy, being inhibited by law and accountable to the mass of the people, would be at a serious disadvantage in a struggle with utterly ruthless terrorists.

That has been the implicit (and sometimes even explicit) view of most of the opinion-forming media in Europe for the past year. Elections would solve nothing. In the murderous chaos of post-war Iraq, democracy was an irrelevance or a sham. Who could believe that it would do any good to wave a ballot paper at people who were happy to blow themselves up in the name of - what? Islam, sectarian power struggle, anti-Americanism? Only those credulous morons in the Bush Administration who seemed to think that everybody in the world wanted to be free.

But it was not the view, interestingly, of Zarqawi himself, who seems to have rather more political insight than the European intelligentsia, the BBC and the Liberal Democrat Party combined.

In a letter intercepted by American forces more than a year ago, he offered his thoughts on the dangers of impending democracy to the leadership of al-Qa'eda. Their cause and their activities could, he said, be dealt a disastrous blow by the prospect of democratic elections in Iraq. To continue the terror campaign would be extremely difficult "because of the gap that will emerge between us and the people of the land".

With an eloquence worthy of an exceptionally well-written political speech, he continues: "How can we fight their cousins and their sons and under what pretext after the Americans, who hold the reins of power from their rear bases, pull back? Democracy is coming and there will be no excuse thereafter."

This is a man who can see the writing on the wall. George W Bush could scarcely have put it better himself. That is why Zarqawi's announcement on Monday is so desperate, swearing vengeance on the democrats who have put his entire mission in such peril. It is why he and his brother terrorists threw absolutely everything that they had into the past six months.

Their only hope was to create a campaign of such vicious, anarchic violence that the democratic initiative would have to be aborted. And every European know-it-all who shook his head sagely, and said that elections should be delayed indefinitely because of that campaign, was playing into their hands.

Democracy is not a delicate plant to be kept under wraps until the perfect conditions are achieved for it to flourish. It is the only possible antidote to terrorism which, whatever its claims of popular support, is inherently totalitarian in its structure and its contempt for life.

Should the worst happen, says Zarqawi in his illuminating letter, and Iraq succumb to the curse of democracy, then the only recourse would be "to pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad recurrent story in the arenas of jihad".