http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050725fa_fact
GET OUT THE VOTE
- SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq's election?
Issue of 2005-07-25
Posted 2005-07-18
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 President's 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 Saddam's 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 ways-including covert action-to 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 group-the Shiites, who represent
sixty per cent of the population; the Sunnis, with twenty per cent; and the
Kurds, with around fifteen per cent-would 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 House's 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
democracy-I 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 Hussein's 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 Allawi-such
an outcome would not be possible or credible, given the strength of the
pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties-but 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 Department's Bureau of Near
Eastern Affairs, who was backed, in this debate, by his superiors and by the
National Security Council. Warrick's 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 Department's 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 principals"-senior officials of the
State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council-"to
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 don't do this-and, in any case, it's crazy, because if anyone gets
word of this manipulation it'll ruin what could be a good thing. It's 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, "We're not going to work with
this if there's 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 II-a 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 Warrick's idea didn't 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 didn't 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 approved"-within 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 election"-that
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 Warrick's
efforts in the early fall. Armitage confirmed this, and told me that he
believed that he was carrying out the President's 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
Administration's view, were seeking to spread democracy. "The finding was
general," a recently retired high-level C.I.A. official told me. "But there's
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
Allawi's 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. That's against the
law." (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)
The essence of Pelosi's objection, the recently retired high-level C.I.A.
official said, was: "Did we have eleven hundred Americans die"-the number of
U.S. combat deaths as of last September-"so they could have a rigged
election?"
Sometime after last November's Presidential election, I was told by past and
present intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided
to override Pelosi's 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 beat"-those involved in the
operation. It was necessary, he added, "because they couldn't 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 Pentagon's civilian leaders
said, "We didn't want to take a chance."
I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that
the activities were kept, in part, "off the books"-they 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 wouldn't 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 operatives-we 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 didn't have to? The Shiites were going to win the election
anyway."
In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush
Administration's 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 voted-man and wife, two times-you'd provide the Kurds with an
incentive to remain in a federation." (Kurdistan had gained partial autonomy
before Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and many Kurds were agitating for
secession.)
The high-ranking United Nations official told me, "The American Embassy's
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 Allawi's 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 Allawi's 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
didn't realize that the President believes what you tell him"-that 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 Allawi's 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 they're 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
station"-in 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 excluded-never
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 can't 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 don't know-maybe it
happens, maybe not."
In retrospect, Les Campbell, of the N.D.I., told me, "we're 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 don't 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 vote-giving them
far less than the two-thirds of the assembly seats needed to form a
government and thus control the writing of the constitution. Allawi's 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 Department's
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 Allawi's surprisingly
strong showing "was due to American manipulation of the election. There's 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. Allawi's slate ran provincial lists in only
eight provinces and received a total of 177,678 provincial votes in those
areas. In the same provinces, Allawi's national list received a total of
452,629 votes-almost 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." Allawi's results, he said, "may not be a unique skewing-sciri
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 April-demonstrating anew the limits of America's 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 insurgency"-beginning 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
Iran-a 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, "It's a new chapter in our relations with Iraq."
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