In yesterday's Times, Alice Miles rightly exploded in disgust at the sneering on the BBC Today programme about the Iraq election. She wrote:

'People will risk their lives going to the polls in areas of Iraq this weekend, and some parts of the media — in other countries as well as in ours, I assume — have already written off those efforts as worthless, the elections as fatally flawed. What blinkered arrogance. Who needs Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to shoot down a nascent democracy when they have some of Britain’s best-loved and respected voices? Perhaps thousands will be killed voting. Perhaps turnout will shrink to levels which render the result illegitimate. At that point, then, discuss the validity of the result. But not before the poll has even occurred. I have yet to hear a broadcaster deliver a factual report about these elections, one which seeks to raise its sights beyond the suicide bombers and the British political angle (will it help Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?).'

Absolutely. The way in which elements in the anti-war camp are dismissing this election is beyond disgusting. They have done everything they possibly can to denigrate the heroic attempt by the Iraqis to become a free society. First they said it was ridiculous to expect the Iraqis to want to have a democracy at all; then they said the election would never happen, thus giving every encouragement to Zarquawi et al to step up the terror; now that they have been proved wrong yet again and the election is happening despite them, they are saying that it won't change anything. and undoubtedly they will seize the slightest pretext to claim that the result is illegitimate. These people will be judged by history in the same light as the appeasers of the Nazis in the 1930s, or the fellow-travellers who once extolled Stalin's Russia -- unprincipled creeps who, when called upon to defend freedom against tyranny, were on the wrong side.