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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