US election: 'Texas to arrest UN observers!'

The manifest absurdity of the US being monitored by OSC, as if it were on a par with the Srpska Republic (whose elections I had the honour of monitoring for OSCE) is so risible that it sent me back to the report from Our Man in Islamabad on the Pakistan elections in 1997 in which I led the UK component of the EU group. Here is a bit of what he said:

 

‘The French made fools of themselves, bringing a political figure – the Vice-President of the National Assembly, who had not the slightest intention of observing the elections. He arrived late, dropped out of his assigned mission, and took himself off to Swat for largely touristic purposes. On his return to Islamabad, he called a national press conference without waiting for the EU report, declared the elections free and fair according to his own extensive observations (presumably from the back seat of his car), and disappeared back to Paris’.

 

I was told later that this guy pitched up accompanied by ‘gorgeous putting Rita Chevrolet’!

 

He was also pretty scathing about the Germans, saying ‘…….they appeared to have no practical experience of elections…..doctrinaire academics whose moral vision got badly out of step with the observable facts. The female member of the group was exclusively concerned with women’s rights in the fiercely traditional tribal areas’.

 

So that is the sort of farce that can be expected in the US, although perhaps not in Texas, where the A-G has threatened to arrest any OSCE person who goes near a polling station.

 

And yet they monitored both ’04 and ’08 elections at the invitation of Dubya without comment as far as I can judge.