FIVE YEARS ON, ARE THINGS REALLY LOOKING UP FOR IRAQIS?

Five years on from an invasion which has perhaps caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including over fifty people in a suicide bombing in Kerbala on Monday, it’s party time in Baghdad and Basra! At least, that’s what much of our mainstream media would have us believe throughout this week. Here’s a sample of headlines from across the West:

• 'Iraq's new optimism',
• 'Iraqis more upbeat',
• 'Iraqis regaining confidence'.

All of this joy and elation and seemingly heady ‘optimism’ is based on a poll of Iraqis carried out by the BBC, ABC and a variety of international broadcasters.

My biggest problem with such polls inside of Iraq is with the people they necessarily (and conveniently) have to exclude. For example, the Iraqi refugees – two million of whom have fled to neighbouring Syria, Jordan, Iran et al. They have tended to vote with their feet, as it were, by fleeing and refusing to return (despite all the triumphal rhetoric from American and Iraqi politicians, in the wake of the US military ‘surge’). They, not surprisingly, tend to be more pessimistic, more negative and more bitter about their lives, their futures, the future of Iraq, etc, than the Iraqis polled inside of Iraq. Yet they – the refugees – represent nearly ten per cent of that nation’s population.

Then there are the dead. Who speaks for them? It’s all very well sending pollsters into the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, Najaf, etc, to find out what Iraqis think of the security situation these days but what would the dead tell those pollsters if they had the chance? What would the million or so Iraqis who have been killed in the five years of sectarian violence and military occupation – according to a study by Opinion Business Research – have to say for themselves, were they given the chance? The silent and often forgotten dead of Iraq represent a mind-boggling and heart-breaking one in twenty-five of that country’s population.

Of course there are other problems with this BBC poll, that has unsurprisingly been trumpeted by the political and media classes alike. I find it’s always sensible in times like this to check the original, raw data of such heavily-spun, heavily-politicized opinion polls. Thankfully, the BBC has actually provided us with a detailed breakdown of the full questions and answers, by percentage, here.

The poll does indeed reveal that, for the first time, a majority of Iraqis do believe their lives are ‘very’ or ‘quite’ good. Yet does this actually translate into ‘optimism’ about the future? Here are some of the facts from the full data of the poll which the headline-writers and media pundits here in the West chose to ignore and overlook:

• A majority of Iraqis continue to believe that life will not improve at all in the coming year.
• A majority of Iraqis refuse to believe that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that, for Iraq as a whole, things are either ‘quite’ or ‘very’ bad.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that life in Iraq, as a whole, will not have improved at all in a year’s time.
• Exactly half of all Iraqis believe the US-led invasion was ‘wrong’ and only a fifth support the war unconditionally, describing it as ‘absolutely right’.
• 70% of Iraqis describe the availability of jobs as ‘bad’ and a whopping 88% of them describe the supply of electricity as ‘bad’ too.
• Only a third of Iraqis believe the security situation in Iraq as a whole has improved over the past twelve months.

So, in conclusion, a much more depressing read than much of the mainstream media would have us believe. Life in Iraq is perhaps better in some, but not all, ways compared to a year ago. But, judging even by this poll, life in general there is still brutal, nasty, insecure and unstable.