Most experts believe that Iraqi national elections will happen this year, and the grotesque, racist idea that Iraqis cannot be democrats because they are primitive tribal people has already been proved wrong. Virtually unreported here, real local elections have been happening in Iraq since the liberation, just as national elections have been happening in northern Iraq since the end of the First Gulf War.The results of these local elections are even more encouraging than I and my Iraqi friends would have dared to dream. There was always, buried deep, a slight but stinging fear that, given freedom, Iraqis would choose the Algerian option: the election of Islamic fundamentalists who would immediately dismantle the democratic process. Iraqi democracy, we fretted in our darkest moments, would consist of one man, one vote, for five minutes.We were right to listen to the much louder optimistic voices in our own minds. Opinion polls, conducted by companies that have accurately predicted election results across the world, have all shown that fewer than 5 per cent of Iraqis want the Iranian option of rule by mullahs The elections held so far have confirmed this.

More cause for despair. Yet the slow, unsexy big picture offers more hope. Yesterday Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, declared that he does not think direct elections in Iraq will be possible by the 30 June deadline for the handover of power to the provisional Iraqi government More cause for despair. The only time British newspaper readers hear about Iraq or Afghanistan is when there is a suicide-bomb. Scattered pieces of human flesh dominate our vision, and the sound of the burning jungles of Vietnam ripples in the distance.

It helps to rationalise the divisions between the US and Europe and "explain" mainland Europe's opposition to the war in Iraq. American officials who should, and do, know better are throwing together Nazism, anti-Semitism, racism and hostility to Israel and Ariel Sharon in one indiscriminate heap. They are playing with fire and risk provoking the very racist backlash they purport to be trying to prevent.m.dejevsky independent.co.uk More from Mary Dejevsky. But neither has anything at all in common with the European anti-Semitism of the last century, contrary to what wide swathes of the American public are being led to believe.That the threat of resurgent anti-Semitism is being waved in front of Americans so consistently and that so few objections have been raised in response should trouble European leaders, who could have done much more to counter the impression that a new Holocaust is just over the horizon. The visit this week of Israel's President to France is a small, but symbolic effort to adjust the record.At the same time, it is hard to escape the impression that it suits the US Administration to depict Europe, especially France, as deeply and incorrigibly anti-Semitic.