20 years on from war, a ground view of 'Iraq's first free and fair election'

Yours truly in Iraq

Twenty years after the Iraq war, much of the anniversary analysis doesn’t linger on the nullity that was the country’s 2005 election. I was there for that election, billed as “Iraq’s first free and fair” tryst with the ballot. It was meant to elect post-war, post-Saddam Iraq’s new National Assembly and herald a brave new beginning. On the same day as the national election, January 30, voters also picked members of the country’s 41 provincial councils.

Embedded with the British Army, mainly in southern Iraq, I remember election day rather well. Along with another journalist, James Astill of The Economist, and a half-platoon of British soldiers, I was holed up in a police station in a small Iraqi town.

We had to argue rather hard with our army minders to be able to go out of the police station on our own. Ultimately, it was a more senior officer who allowed us to briefly leave, so long as we signed off on the army bearing any responsibility for our fate, while out of th…