William Shawcross does a marvellous demolition job on Rod Liddle (whose supposed virtues have always been a mystery to me) and Andrew Gilligan, for their respective pieces in last week's Speccie.

Anger and detailed facts - a lethal combination in Shawcross' hands:

Liddle’s most awful claim (which headlined his article) is that Iraqis were ‘better off’ under Saddam Hussein. He asserts that 14,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war began (he does not source this claim) and goes on to say that it is ‘my guess’ that that was more than Saddam would have killed in a year.

Why on earth would Mr Liddle want to make such an odiously casual ‘guess’? Has he read anything at all about Saddam’s rule or does he just not give a damn? Max Van der Stoel, the UN special rapporteur on human rights for Iraq, said that the brutality of the regime was ‘so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the second world war’. Did Liddle see the thousands of bereaved people scrabbling in Saddam’s mass graves this time a year ago? Did he care about the losses of their husbands, fathers, mothers, sons?

...There is violence and there is progress in Iraq. Most visitors understand that. Pace Gilligan and Liddle, most Iraqis are using their freedom well. From his privileged perch in Doughty Street, Liddle asserts, ‘Right now, there is not the faintest glimmer that the Iraqis are clamouring for more secular democracy.’ The truth, however, is that municipal elections have been held in 17 cities so far; according to Taheri they have all been won by democratic and secularist parties. There are now more children in school and university than at any time in the last 20 years. There is not yet enough clean water or electricity, but there is more in more places than under Saddam.

There are 200 newspapers in Iraq, instead of the few that mouthed the ghastly Saddamite lies a year ago. Iraq’s Mafia-style command economy is history and foreign capital has been rushing into the country. Many Marsh Arabs are now moving back to their traditional rivers, which are being reflooded after Saddam drained them in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing.

The more progress, the more violence to stop it. Mario Vargas Llosa has written of ‘the various sects and movements bent on provoking the Apocalypse in order to prevent Iraq from soon becoming a free and modern country ...a perspective that rightfully terrifies and drives insane the gangs of murderers and torturers [of Saddam Hussein’s rule] along with the fundamentalist commandoes from al-Qa’eda.... All of them, totalling only a few thousand armed fanatics, but with extraordinary tools for destruction, know that if Iraq becomes a modern democracy, their days are numbered.’

Vargas Llosa is right. How sad it is that two senior writers of The Spectator prefer to resort to meretricious, sneering commentary. The ‘trahison des clercs’ is truly upon us.