Four Years Later

23^rd March 2007

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

It was quite a few weeks in 2003 between 19 March and 12 April. With the benefit of four years’ accumulated wisdom one can now pass some judgment on two events that happened four years ago, one local and one international.

On 19 March 2003, the US and a very skimpy international alliance started the war on Iraq which had to lead to a regime change, the discovery and destruction of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the installation of democracy in Iraq, which had to serve as a beacon of light for the democratisation and westernisation of the entire Middle East, leading to stability of oil exports from the region at prices which would help the developed economies to continue buying energy supplies at a cheap price.

On 12 April 2003, the Nationalist Party was given an undeserved election victory on a silver platter by the Malta Labour Party which obstinately refused to decouple the European Union issue from the general election result, forcing the hand of many voters who wished to vote for change to reluctantly vote for more of the same.

Though the war in Iraq has much more serious repercussions on a global scale than the outcome of one particular election in a tiny island state, I cannot help drawing some similarities.

Both events started with a lot of misplaced hope based on outright misrepresentation, which is now causing the incumbents serious problems of credibility. The PN had promised that EU membership would lead to an eternal spring and that our problems would find instant painless solutions through attraction of foreign investment creating work and wealth. Objective observers like yours truly who argued that the benefits of EU membership are mainly in disciplining our politicians to do what needs to be done irrespective of their electoral fortunes were pooh-poohed or outrightly rubbished by the PN.

The chickens are coming home to roost. The very fact that the Gonzi administration had to manoeuvre within the corset of stringent quality standards set by EU regulation has produced an immediate impact, irrespective of the long-term benefits, which is a far cry from the promised eternal spring. The PN has lost each and every electoral test faced during these four years and hopes for a velvet revolution in the tail-end of the legislature seem misplaced given that Labour is unlikely to hand over the election again on a silver platter by linking some one-off higher order issue to the next election result as it stupidly did in 2003.

For the Bush administration, the chickens have roosted already. Not only has President Bush broken all records of personal unpopularity for any incumbent president, but the Republicans have lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The price of oil is meantime roughly double what it was at the start of the Iraq war, reflecting in part the risk premium for the regional instability that has been caused by the Iraq war.

Both events have other similarities.

They both promised flowers and prosperity. The PN by promising that EU membership of its own would be a panacea for all our ills leading to an instant eternal spring, whereas the invasion of Iraq was depicted as a necessary regime change to free the world from the risk of abuse of WMD leading to the invading forces to be greeted as liberators and showered with flowers as they entered Baghdad.

Both events have instead ended in a sea of red. The PN has seen itself immersed in a sea of red Labour votes, which seems to have gathered enough momentum as to become irreversible in the remaining time of this legislature. The US administration has seen itself locked in a Catch-22 situation of being damned if they stay and damned if they leave. Not only has their misrepresentation to justify the war been exposed for wide international condemnation, diluting the role the US commands on the world stage, but it has been the cause of far more carnage and instability that the cruel Saddam regime could have ever dreamt of.

More US military personnel have now been killed on the Iraq war stage than the number of all lives lost in the 9/11 terrorist acts, and this not to mention the tens of thousands, some even suggest hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis killed in the near civil war now eroding the last traces of civilisation in Iraq forcing millions to flee to safety in foreign lands abandoning their family, their possessions and their dreams merely to try to keep their body and soul together. And yet there is no way out and President Bush’s assurances that victory is still possible sound more hollow by the day as it has become impossible to define what would constitute victory.

What a difference four years make!