Get Out The
Vote
By Seymour M.
Hersh
19 July, 2005
The
New Yorker
The
January 30th election in Iraq was publicly perceived as a political
triumph for George W. Bush and a vindication of his decision to overturn
the regime of Saddam Hussein. More than eight million Iraqis defied
the threats of the insurgency and came out to vote for provincial councils
and a national assembly. Many of them spent hours waiting patiently
in line, knowing that they were risking their lives. Images of smiling
Iraqis waving purple index fingers, signifying that they had voted,
were transmitted around the world. Even some of the Presidents
harshest critics acknowledged that he might have been right: democracy,
as he defined it, could take hold in the Middle East. The fact that
very few Sunnis, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein, chose to vote
was seen within the Administration as a temporary setback. The sense
of victory faded, however, amid a continued political stalemate, increased
violence, and a hardening of religious divides. After three months of
bitter sectarian infighting, a government was finally formed. It is
struggling to fulfill its primary task: to draft a new constitution
by mid-August.
Whether the election
could sustain its promise had been in question from the beginning. The
Administration was confronted with a basic dilemma: The likely winner
of a direct and open election would be a Shiite religious party. The
Shiites were bitter opponents of Saddams regime, and suffered
under it, but many Shiite religious and political leaders are allied,
to varying degrees, with the mullahs of Iran. As the election neared,
the Administration repeatedly sought waysincluding covert actionto
manipulate the outcome and reduce the religious Shiite influence. Not
everything went as planned.
The initial election
plan, endorsed in late 2003 by Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, involved a caucus system in which the C.P.A.
would be able to exert enormous influence over the selection of a transitional
government. Each major ethnic groupthe Shiites, who represent
sixty per cent of the population; the Sunnis, with twenty per cent;
and the Kurds, with around fifteen per centwould have a fixed
number of seats in a national assembly. The U.S. hoped to hold the election
before the transfer of sovereignty, which was scheduled for June 30,
2004, but the lack of security made the deadline unrealistic. Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of one of the Shiite
parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or
sciri, agreed to accept a delay, as the U.S. wanted, in return for the
White Houses commitment to hold a direct one-man, one-vote election.
President Bush agreed. It was a change in policy that many in the Administration
feared would insure a Shiite majority in the new assembly.
The obstacles to
a free election, in a country with shallow democratic roots, suffering
from years of dictatorship, a foreign invasion, and an insurgency, were
immense. As Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the C.P.A., warned Bremer
in a March, 2004, memorandum, Political parties that have never
contested democratic elections before tend to fall back upon their worst
instincts and experience. They buy votes, and frequently they buy electoral
officials. . . . They use armed thugs to intimidate opposition, and
even to assassinate opponents. . . . They may use force and fraud to
steal or stuff the ballot boxes.
In a second memo,
Diamond noted that sciri and Dawa, the other major Shiite party, as
well as more militant Shiite paramilitary groups, were believed to be
receiving funding and training from Iran. Most of the other political
parties complain of the difficulty of finding the financial resources
to organize, mobilize support, and prepare to contest elections,
Diamond wrote. Several have appealed directly, if discreetly,
for some kind of international assistance, including from the United
States.
He urged Bremer
to set up a transparent fund that would distribute operating cash equitably
to all political parties. Alternative mechanisms to level the
playing field are unlikely to work, Diamond wrote. Specifically,
he argued against giving money covertly to favored parties, such as
the slate controlled by Iyad Allawi, the acting Prime Minister, a secular
Shiite, who was a staunch American ally. During the Cold War, he noted
in his second memo, the United States channeled covert resources
to political parties that appeared more moderate and democratic, and
more pro-Western. That is no longer possible or sensible.
Diamond received
no official response from Bremer or from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security
adviser, to whom he forwarded the memorandums. In his recent book, Squandered
Victory, Diamond, who had previously worked with Rice, argued
that the Bush Administration bungled the occupation. In April, he returned
to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is a senior
fellow.
In his meetings
with political leaders in Iraq before the election, Diamond told me,
I said, matter-of-factly, that of course the United States could
not operate the way we did in the Cold War. We had to be fair and transparent
in everything we did, if we were really interested in promoting democracyI
took it as simply an article of faith.
By the late spring
of 2004, according to officials in the State Department, Congress, and
the United Nations, the Bush Administration was engaged in a debate
over the very issue that Diamond had warned about: providing direct
support to Allawi and other parties seen as close to the United States
and hostile to Iran. Allawi, who had spent decades in exile and worked
both for Saddam Husseins Mukhabarat and for Western intelligence
agencies, lacked strong popular appeal. The goal, according to several
former intelligence and military officials, was not to achieve outright
victory for Allawisuch an outcome would not be possible or credible,
given the strength of the pro-Iranian Shiite religious partiesbut
to minimize the religious Shiites political influence. The Administration
hoped to keep Allawi as a major figure in a coalition government, and
to do so his party needed a respectable share of the vote.
The main advocate
for channelling aid to preferred parties was Thomas Warrick, a senior
adviser on Iraq for the State Departments Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs, who was backed, in this debate, by his superiors and by the
National Security Council. Warricks plan involved using forty
million dollars that had been appropriated for the election to covertly
provide cell phones, vehicles, radios, security, administrative help,
and cash to the parties the Administration favored. The State Departments
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor resisted this plan, and
turned to three American non-governmental organizations that have for
decades helped to organize and monitor elections around the world: the
National Democratic Institute (N.D.I.), the International Republican
Institute (I.R.I.), and the National Endowment for Democracy (N.E.D.).
It was a huge
debate, a participant in the discussions told me. Warrick
said he had gotten the Administration principalssenior officials
of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Councilto
agree. The N.G.O.s were fighting a rearguard action to get
this election straight, and emphasized at meetings that the
idea of picking favorites never works, he said.
There was
a worry that a lot of money was being put aside in walking-around money
for Allawi, the participant in the discussions told me. The
N.G.O.s said, We dont do thisand, in any case, its
crazy, because if anyone gets word of this manipulation itll ruin
what could be a good thing. Its the wrong way to do it.
The N.G.O.s tried to drive a stake into the heart of it.
Over the summer
and early fall of 2004, the N.G.O.s arranged meetings with several senior
officials, including John Negroponte, who was then the U.S. Ambassador
to Iraq. A pattern developed, the participant in the discussions said.
The N.G.O.s, he recounted, would say, Were not going to
work with this if theres people out there passing around money.
We will not be part of any covert operation, and we need your word that
the election will be open and transparent, and the officials would
reassure them. Within weeks of a meeting, the N.G.O.s would still
hear word of a Track IIa covert group, the participant said.
The money was to be given to Allawi and others.
A European election
expert who was involved in planning the Iraqi election recalled that
Warrick was always negative about the Shiites and their ties to
the Iranians. He thought he could manipulate the election by playing
with the political process, and he pushed the N.G.O.s on it really hard.
Les Campbell, the
regional director of the N.D.I. for the Middle East and North Africa,
told me that he immediately realized how deep the American desire
to do something to help Allawi was. Campbell acknowledged that
he and his colleagues had kept up a running dispute with Warrick. At
first, it seemed that the N.G.O.s had won, and the forty million dollars
was given in grants for the N.G.O.s to help plan and monitor the election.
But the pressure from the Administration to provide direct support for
specific parties was unrelenting, and Warricks idea didnt
go away. As the campaign progressed, Campbell said, It became
clear that Allawi and his coalition had huge resources, although nothing
was flowing through normal channels. He had very professional and very
sophisticated media help and saturation television coverage.
The focus on Allawi,
Campbell said, blinded the White House to some of the realities on the
ground. The Administration was backing the wrong parties in Iraq,
he said. We told them, The parties you like are going to
get creamed. They didnt believe it.
What Tom Warrick
was trying to do was not stupid, a senior United Nations official
who was directly involved in planning for the Iraqi election told me.
He was desperate, because Bremer and the White House had empowered
the Iranians. Warrick was trying to see what could be salvaged.
He added that the answer, as far as the United States was concerned,
was Allawi, who, despite his dubious past, was the nearest thing
to an Iraqi with whom the White House could salvage the nation.
A State Department
official confirmed that there was an effort to give direct funding to
certain candidates. The goal was to level the playing field, and
Allawi was not the sole playing field, he said. Warrick was not
operating on his own, the State Department official said. This
issue went to high levels, and was approvedwithin the State
Department and by others in the Bush Administration, in the late spring
of 2004. A lot of people were involved in it and shared the idea,
including, he claimed, some of the N.G.O. operatives working in Iraq.
He added, The story that should be written is why the neoconservatives
and others in the U.S. government who were hostile to Iran had this
blind spot when it came to the electionthat is, why they
endorsed a process that, as Warrick and his colleagues saw it, would
likely bring pro-Iranian parties to power.
In any case, the
State Department official said, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary
of State under Colin Powell, put an end to Warricks efforts in
the early fall. Armitage confirmed this, and told me that he believed
that he was carrying out the Presidents wishes. There was
a question at a principals meeting about whether we should try
and change the vote, Armitage recalled, and the President said
several times, We will not put our thumb on the scale.
Nonetheless, in
the same time period, former military and intelligence officials told
me, the White House promulgated a highly classified Presidential finding
authorizing the C.I.A. to provide money and other support covertly to
political candidates in certain countries who, in the Administrations
view, were seeking to spread democracy. The finding was general,
a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official told me. But theres
no doubt that Baghdad was a stop on the way. The process is under the
control of the C.I.A. and the Defense Department.
It is not known
why the President would reject one program to intervene in the election
and initiate another, more covert one. According to Pentagon consultants
and former senior intelligence officials, there was a growing realization
within the White House that most Sunnis would indeed boycott the election.
Getting accurate polls in a country under occupation, with an active
insurgency, was, of course, difficult. But the available polls showed
Allawis ratings at around three or four per cent through most
of 2004, and also showed the pro-Iranian Shiite slate at more than fifty
per cent. The Administration had optimistically assumed that the political
and security situation would improve, despite warnings from the intelligence
community that it would not.
A former senior
intelligence official told me, The election clock was running
down, and people were panicking. The polls showed that the Shiites were
going to run off with the store. The Administration had to do something.
How?
By then, the men
in charge of the C.I.A. were dying to help out, and make sure
the election went the right way, the recently retired C.I.A. official
recalled. It was known inside the intelligence community, he added,
that the Iranians and others were providing under-the-table assistance
to various factions. The concern, he said, was that the bad guys
would win.
Under federal law,
a finding must be submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees
or, in exceptional cases, only to the intelligence committee chairs
and ranking members and the Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress.
At least one Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, strongly
protested any interference in the Iraqi election. (An account of the
dispute was published in Time last October.) The recently retired C.I.A.
official recounted angrily, She threatened to blow the whole thing
up in the press by going public. The White House folded to Pelosi.
And, for a time, she brought it to a halt. Pelosi would
not confirm or deny this account, except, in an e-mail from her spokesman,
to vigorously deny that she had threatened to go public.
She added, I have never threatened to make any classified information
public. Thats against the law. (The White House did not
respond to requests for comment.)
The essence of Pelosis
objection, the recently retired high-level C.I.A. official said, was:
Did we have eleven hundred Americans diethe number
of U.S. combat deaths as of last Septemberso they could
have a rigged election?
Sometime after last
Novembers Presidential election, I was told by past and present
intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided
to override Pelosis objections and covertly intervene in the Iraqi
election. A former national-security official told me that he had learned
of the effort from people who worked the beatthose
involved in the operation. It was necessary, he added, because
they couldnt afford to have a disaster.
A Pentagon consultant
who deals with the senior military leadership acknowledged that the
American authorities in Iraq did an operation to try to
influence the results of the election. They had to, he said.
They were trying to make a case that Allawi was popular, and he
had no juice. A government consultant with close ties to the Pentagons
civilian leaders said, We didnt want to take a chance.
I was informed by
several former military and intelligence officials that the activities
were kept, in part, off the booksthey were conducted
by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used
funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress. Some in the
White House and at the Pentagon believed that keeping an operation off
the books eliminated the need to give a formal briefing to the relevant
members of Congress and congressional intelligence committees, whose
jurisdiction is limited, in their view, to officially sanctioned C.I.A.
operations. (The Pentagon is known to be running clandestine operations
today in North Africa and Central Asia with little or no official C.I.A.
involvement.)
The Administration
wouldnt take the chance of doing it within the system, the
former senior intelligence official said. The genius of the operation
lies in the behind-the-scenes operativeswe have hired hands that
deal with this. He added that a number of military and intelligence
officials were angered by the covert plans. Their feeling was How
could we take such a risk, when we didnt have to? The Shiites
were going to win the election anyway.
In my reporting
for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administrations
increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish
its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling
blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections:
bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from
outsiders.
The methods and
the scope of the covert effort have been hard to discern. The current
and former military and intelligence officials who spoke to me about
the election operation were unable, or unwilling, to give precise details
about who did what and where on Election Day. These sources said they
heard reports of voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, bribery, and the
falsification of returns, but the circumstances, and the extent of direct
American involvement, could not be confirmed.
And, as Larry Diamond
noted, there was also a strong possibility that Iraqis themselves would
attempt voter fraud, with or without assistance from the U.S. According
to the government consultant with close ties to Pentagon civilians,
the C.P.A. accepted the reality of voter fraud on the part of the Kurds,
whom the Americans viewed as the only blocking group against the
Shiites running wild. He said, People thought that
by looking the other way as Kurds votedman and wife, two timesyoud
provide the Kurds with an incentive to remain in a federation.
(Kurdistan had gained partial autonomy before Saddam Husseins
overthrow, and many Kurds were agitating for secession.)
The high-ranking
United Nations official told me, The American Embassys aim
was to make sure that Allawi remained as Prime Minister, and they tried
to do it through manipulation of the system. But he also said
that there was cheating on the other side. The Shiites rigged
the election in the south as much as ballots were rigged for Allawi.
He added, You are right that it was rigged, but you did not rig
it well enough.
Several weeks before
the election, Margaret McDonagh, a political operative close to Tony
Blair, showed up at Allawis side in Baghdad, and immediately got
involved in a last-minute barrage of campaigning, advertising, and spending.
(McDonagh did not respond to a request for comment.) These efforts,
and Allawis own attempt to present himself as a forceful Prime
Minister, apparently helped to raise his standing. In one American poll,
he came close to nine per cent in the days before the election.
A second senior
U.N. official, who was also involved in the Iraqi election, told me
that for months before the election he warned the C.P.A. and his superiors
that the voting as it was planned would not meet U.N. standards. The
lack of security meant that candidates were unwilling to campaign openly,
as in a normal election, for fear of becoming targets. Candidates ran
as members of party lists, but the parties kept most of the names on
their lists secret during the campaign, so voters did not even know
who was running. The electorate was left, in most cases, with little
basis for a decision beyond ethnic and religious ties. The United Nations
official said, The election was not an election but a referendum
on ethnic and religious identity. For the Kurds, voting was about selfdetermination.
For the Shiites, voting was about a fatwa issued by Sistani.
Some of the Americans
working with the Administration on Iraq assumed that, once the Presidential
election was over, Bush would delay the vote until security improved
and more Sunnis could be brought in. In a Times Op-Ed piece published
in late September, Noah Feldman, a consultant on constitutional issues
for the C.P.A., warned that without Sunni participation, the election
results would be worse than useless. . . . Nobody expects perfection,
but trying to rush ahead to democracy will increase the chances that
we will never get there at all.
Feldman, who teaches
at New York University Law School, told me that the Administration rejected
this advice. The neocons were true believers, Feldman said,
referring to the senior civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and
they focussed on building an Iraq with no ethnicity and religion. They
didnt realize that the President believes what you tell himthat
the election would diminish sectarian strife.
On Election Day,
the weaknesses of the system and the potential for abuse were evident.
The lack of security, which has severely restricted the ability of reporters
to travel in Iraq, caused many international organizations that normally
monitor elections to stay away. The European Union declined to send
a delegation. An election expert who was in Iraq told me that he knew
of only two international observers in the country on Election Day,
one of whom was in the Green Zone. Most observers were Iraqis who had
recently been trained by the American N.G.O.s or were affiliated with
political parties.
The government consultant
said that while the N.G.O.s had deployed most of the poll watchers to
Shiite and Kurdish areas, fraud on Allawis behalf took place in
the Sunni areas. He added, You never have enough observers in
any election, and so how do you maximize their effectiveness? You never
announce in advance where theyre going. But in Iraq the people
on the inside tipped them off, referring to the Iraqis and American
operatives who were involved in manipulating the election. They
knew where the observers would and would not go.
One of the most
scrutinized areas was in and around the ethnically mixed city of Mosul,
in Nineveh Province. The election expert depicted the situation there
as chaotic. Ballot boxes from four hundred and fifty polling stations
flooded into a regional center that had been set up at the last minute
because of security concerns. Many boxes had apparently been filled
with bundles of ballots, nicely arranged, before they were
sealed, he said. Some ballots were simply dropped off in cardboard boxes.
The process was marked by questionable counting and sloppy recordkeeping.
It was, he said, woefully inadequate.
An after-action
assessment from Mosul forwarded to the Independent Electoral Commission
of Iraq (I.E.C.I.) concluded that approximately forty per cent of the
ballots in the Mosul area could not be allocated to a specific
polling stationin other words, it was not possible to determine
which station they had come from. The report estimated that at least
ten per cent of the hundreds of ballot boxes had been stuffed.
Two American election
officials who were in Iraq acknowledged that there were problems but
said that, at least in areas where observers were present, they were
able to prevent many disputed ballots from being counted. An American
who served as an adviser to the I.E.C.I. told me that he knew of three
hundred questionable boxes from Mosul that were excludednever
counted. There was cause for concern, both agreed, in the areas
where, for security reasons, many observers could not be sent, especially
in the Sunni regions.
Farid Ayar, a spokesman
for the I.E.C.I., said, I can assure you that neither the U.S.
nor any other foreign nation intervened in our pure and honest election.
I know of no such allegations. When asked about fraud by domestic
parties, he added, You cant check that. Maybe in a village
somewhere somebody gave someone fifty dollars to vote for a candidate.
It happens in most of the Third World countries. You dont knowmaybe
it happens, maybe not.
In retrospect, Les
Campbell, of the N.D.I., told me, were really proud of what
we did. In the end, the election was administered as well as it could
have been, and the Iraqi citizens became convinced that there was a
reason to vote. Yes, there were problems, but engaging in the democratic
process is important. He added, We did our best, and we
dont know if anything that happened would have had a substantial
effect on the election.
The final election
totals were announced twelve days after the voting, and they contained
some surprises and anomalies. The pro-Iranian Shiites did worse than
anticipated, with forty-eight per cent of the votegiving them
far less than the two-thirds of the assembly seats needed to form a
government and thus control the writing of the constitution. Allawis
slate did well, at least compared with his standing in earlier polls,
gathering nearly fourteen per cent. The Kurds won twenty-six per cent
of the vote. They had undoubtedly benefitted from a large, coördinated,
and legitimate turnout. But the Turkmen and the Arabs, two minority
groups in Kurdistan, held public protests accusing the I.E.C.I. of mismanagement
and fraud, and demanded new elections.
Ghassan Atiyyah,
a secular Shiite who worked on the State Departments postwar planning
project before the invasion of Iraq and is now the director of the Iraq
Foundation for Development and Democracy, in Baghdad, told me that he
and many of his associates believed that Allawis surprisingly
strong showing was due to American manipulation of the election.
Theres no doubt about it. The Americans, directly or indirectly,
spent millions on Allawi. Atiyyah went on, As an Iraqi who
supported the use of force to overthrow Saddam, I can tell you that
as long as real democratic practices are not adhered to, you Americans
cannot talk about democracy.
On Election Day,
voters had been handed ballots for the national assembly and for the
provincial councils. Allawis slate ran provincial lists in only
eight provinces and received a total of 177,678 provincial votes in
those areas. In the same provinces, Allawis national list received
a total of 452,629 votesalmost three times the number of provincial
votes.
Most election experts
I spoke to found the deviation surprising and difficult to explain.
The State Department official, however, said that Allawi had no
organized campaign in the provinces, and the people he was running with
locally had no appeal. The official then raised questions about
possible irregularities in the Shiite vote. Opinion polls consistently
showed that Dawa candidates were beating the sciri party by two to one,
he said. In the actual election, in some provinces sciri beat
Dawa two to one. Allawis results, he said, may not
be a unique skewingsciri may have done it, too.
A few weeks after
the election, a European intelligence official, having acknowledged
that he had heard allegations of voter fraud, told me, The question
will be: How will the elections be perceived in Iraq? As legitimate
and fair? Or not?
The election results
made it necessary for the parties to form a coalition, as the Bush Administration
had anticipated, and the U.S. initially lobbied for a major political
role for Allawi. But Allawi, who had continued to serve as the acting
Prime Minister, got no post when the new Iraq government was formed,
in late Aprildemonstrating anew the limits of Americas ability
to control events in Iraq. Ibrahim al-Jafaari, of the Dawa party, became
Prime Minister, and a Kurd, Jalal Talabani, became President.
In recent weeks,
the Shiite and Kurdish leadership has agreed to put more Sunnis on the
commission that is writing the constitution. The Shiite community is
likely to limit their influence. Still, some observers, such as Noah
Feldman, believe that the Sunnis on the commission are going to
try very hard to bring on board the serious players who can speak for
the Sunni side of the insurgencybeginning a process that
could lead to stability in Iraq.
If this takes place,
the election may still be judged a success. But what the Administration
accomplished in its interventions is questionable. The efforts to reduce
the Shiites plurality, if they had any effect, only delayed their
formation of a government, contributing to the instability and disillusionment
that have benefitted the insurgency in recent months. The election outcome
also strengthened the political hand of the Kurds, who have demanded
more autonomy and refused to disband their powerful militias.
In early July, Jafaari
stunned Washington by signing an extensive pact with Irana nation
that President Bush named as part of an axis of evil. The deal reportedly
included a billion dollars in military and reconstruction aid. At a
joint press conference in Tehran, Ali Shamkhani, the Iranian Defense
Minister, said, Its a new chapter in our relations with
Iraq.
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