Saddam declares his presidency perfect

It was the mother of all elections. Never before in the annals of Arab democracy has any potentate won 100 per cent of the vote. But Saddam Hussein has achieved a victory even greater than the 99.96 per cent he received seven years ago.

So let's quote Izzat Ibrahim, vice-chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council: "Someone who does not know the Iraqi people, he will not believe this percentage, but it is real. We don't have opposition in Iraq." He can say that again.

One hundred per cent. Who cannot recall the imperishable Auden poem on a dictator. "Perfection of a kind was what he was after/And the poetry he invented was easy to understand." President Saddam only writes novels, but what could be more perfect than 100 per cent? His 99.96 per cent vote was in 1995, when a few doubting voters might have thought Saddam would not survive. This time, the 0.04 per cent was clearly shaken out of its lethargy.

No wonder the White House was so snotty. "Not a serious vote," Ari Fleischer, George Bush's press secretary, said yesterday. Of course. Mr Bush, whose election majority left a lot to be desired, would have loved that 100 per cent.

Not long ago, Hosni Mubarak claimed the presidency of Egypt with 99.98 per cent of the vote. No snotty comments from Mr Fleischer then, because Egypt is on "our" side – and over the decades, Arab voters have produced some extraordinary results. President Hafez el-Assad of Syria always scored in the mid-90 per cents. And the record was in Syria, more than five decades ago. For in 1954, the Syrian interior minister, Mohamed Zaim, announced that President Adib Shishakli – after as many as four coups d'états – had won the presidency by 104 per cent. This figure was so outrageous that Shishakli at once fired Zaim, admitting that his vote was a mere 99.99 per cent, 0.03 per cent higher than President Saddam's last election, 0.01 per cent higher than Mubarak's.

Mr Ibrahim warned the Americans that, if they invaded, they would "face these people who said 'yes' to Saddam. If the US makes a mistake and attacks Iraq, we will fight them. If they come, we will fight them in every village and every house ... All Iraqis are armed and by God's will we will triumph."

State television showed Iraqis dancing in the streets. Children were waving their fists and shouting Saddam's name. The leadership had taken the precaution of declaring yesterday a holiday. Gunfire rang out from rooftops in celebration as the results were declared.

Needless to say, there must be a suspension of disbelief. For if we are to believe these results, we must also accept that Iraq was able to count 11,445,638 paper ballots overnight, as well as those votes cast by Iraqis in Beirut, where President Saddam's loyal citizens turned up at the embassy in singing queues, and those signed by the tortured and the dying and the condemned in Abu Ghraib prison. All in all, quite a performance.

* An Iraqi diplomat has denied that President Saddam has doubles that stand in for him. He has not appeared in public since December 2000. An Austrian magazine reported this month that when the far-right leader Jörg Haider went to Iraq last winter and supposedly met the President, he may have been photographed with a look-alike. The Iraqi charge d'affaires in Madrid, Mohammed Abdel Azziz Hussein, denied the Praqi president engaged in such a practice.