Bush, Iraq, and Demonstration Elections
by Rahul Mahajan
Last October, when Vladimir Putin engineered the election of his hand-picked subordinate Ahmad Kadyrov as president of Chechnya through tactics such as pressuring the leading candidate, Malik Saidullayev, to withdraw (and then forcing him out with a court injunction) and hiring another candidate to be on his staff, Western punditry was not slow to condemn the election as a farce and a sham. It did so again when he interfered as blatantly in the recent August elections in Chechnya. Ever since 9/11, however, the Bush administration has been treating us to a series of equally farcical "elections" with minimal or no comment from the same sources. The matter has now come to what should be a crisis point over plans to engineer the upcoming U.N. Security Council-mandated elections in Iraq. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was once again in the news regarding his concerns that the main U.S.-affiliated political parties (the ones that formed the Governing Council and that now dominate the transitional assembly) are negotiating on a "consensus slate" of candidates for the elections. While his main reported concern is that the Shi'a majority of Iraq will be underrepresented, based on an estimate from the early 90's that 55% of the Iraqi population is Shi'a Arab compared to his estimate of 65% today, there is a much more serious question at stake - the legitimacy of the elections. In some countries, with a well-established parliamentary system and a history of active political parties and an inclusive public discourse, slates like this are not necessarily a problem. In systems like India's, with numerous parties and a first-past-the-post voting system (no matter how many candidates there are, the candidate with the most votes wins, with no runoffs), such electoral alliances may be necessary to get smaller parties some degree of parliamentary representation. In Iraq, however, this is simply a setup for a sham election. Let's look at the history of recent U.S. demonstration elections. In the June 2002 Afghan loya jirga, roughly 1500 delegates assembled to pick the interim president of the country. Although all delegates were under a great degree of pressure by U.S.-backed warlords (who did everything from killing delegates before the assembly to controlling the floor at the assembly), over 800 signed a statement in support of Zahir Shah, the exiled monarch. According to Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, delegates to the loya jirga, the United States then stepped in and "the entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former king was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the government." (NYT, 6/21/02) When the assembly resumed, delegates were given a choice between Hamid Karzai and two unknown candidates running for symbolic value (one of them was a woman) - essentially, as in the Chechnya elections, they were presented with a fait accompli. More recently, the Bush administration pushed to have Afghan elections before the U.S. elections, then switched around and pressured the Afghan Electoral Commission to delay the parliamentary elections until next April (CSM, 7/13/04) while going ahead with presidential elections in October. There has been no time for anyone in the country to emerge as a national rival to Karzai, so this will effectively be a one-candidate election with a veneer of democratic choice; the results of the parliamentary elections would not be nearly so predictable or controllable by the United States, and serendipitously they have been put off. In Iraq, the U.S. record is worse. Much propaganda has been made of the local "elections" instituted by U.S. forces, but to believe it calls for a willing disjunction from reality. In some places, the "election" was an appointment of mayor and/or city council members by the local U.S. commander, sometimes disastrously, as when U.S. forces appointed a Sunni from Baghdad to be mayor of the mostly Shi'a Najaf, cancelled an election he would surely have lost, and later had to remove him anyway because of charges of corruption and Ba'athist links (WP, 6/28/03, and others). In Basra, British and U.S. forces appointed local officials and then removed them and decided explicitly that Iraqis would only serve in a technocratic capacity, not a political one (WP, 5/29/03). In other places, like Kirkuk, the "election" was one conducted by 300 delegates all hand-picked and vetted by U.S. forces, not by the people of Kirkuk. In late June, U.S. commanders had ordered a halt to all local elections, because they had determined that in many places people and groups they didn't like were too popular and might win (WP, 6/28/03). That is unfortunately one of the problems with democracy. A few days later, Paul Bremer approved resumption of elections (WP, 7/1/03), but allowed local commanders to choose between appointment, election by specially vetted caucuses, and actual elections; unstated was the conclusion that U.S. commanders should choose the form of "election" based on the likelihood of getting the result they wanted. All of these experiments in "democracy" were, of course, in a context where U.S. commanders could countermand any city council decision and dissolve any council as they so chose. At the national level, things have been worse. Of course, elections have been postponed repeatedly, even though the difficulties that exist in Afghanistan did not exist in Iraq (for example, the ubiquitous ration cards could have been used as a basis for voter identification and registration); even the January elections are mandated only because other countries on the Security Council insisted on the setting of a date as a condition for approving Resolution 1546, on the so-called "transfer of sovereignty." But numerous other ostensibly national political processes have been cancelled or manipulated as well. An assembly planned for June 2003, that would have involved mostly the U.S.-designated exile-dominated "Iraqi opposition" was cancelled by Paul Bremer. He said it was because the "opposition" was not representative of the country; then, a month later he chose, entirely on his own authority, 25 people, 16 of them exiles, to form the Governing Council. In August, as the center of Najaf was ceaselessly bombarded, a national assembly of roughly 1300 delegates met to select the transitional national assembly, a body of 100 people whose formation was mandated by the "transfer of sovereignty" process (actually, 81 delegates were to be selected, the other 19 coming from the old Governing Council). Ostensibly picked by democratic processes in their locality, the delegates certainly did represent a wide variety of parties and views, although major groups opposed to the occupation were under-represented (Moqtada al-Sadr, whose organization was under military assault at the time, boycotted the conference). Imagine the surprise of the delegates when they came to the conference and found out that there would be no nomination of candidates, campaigning, or elections. Instead, they were confronted with a pre-selected slate of 81 candidates, picked by back-room negotiations between the major U.S.-affiliated (former Governing Council) parties, and expected to rubber-stamp it. Smaller parties made an attempt to come up with an opposition slate, but were unable to, and at the end the U.S.-backed slate was not even presented to the delegates for formal approval (AP, 8/18/04). This last sham would likely embarrass even Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the Bush administration is happy with elections in places it controls, like Afghanistan or Iraq, as long as there are no choices (when there are, as in Florida, strange things can happen). There is not a shred of a reason to doubt that this is precisely what is planned for the January elections in Iraq - collusion by the U.S.-backed political parties to pick Iraqi figures who will continue to collaborate with the occupation and to shut out all other Iraqi voices. There is a deplorable tendency in this country to use words like "freedom" and "democracy" in a purely talismanic manner, without attaching any actual meaning to them - only thus could the coups in Guatemala in 1954 or in Haiti in 2004 be hailed as advances for democracy. But the current administration, the Republican Party, and George W. Bush take this to heretofore undreamed of extremes, as could be seen clearly at the Republican National Convention this year. For Bush, apparently, democracy means any kind of election at all - a definition that would make Saddam Hussein perfectly happy (he won an "election" with an unprecedented 100% of the vote in October 2002). Or, more pointedly, to Bush, democracy and freedom mean "anything the United States does" and, even worse, "anything I do." The implications for the United States and its internal affairs ought to be as clear as the implications for Iraq. If you mobilize to ensure that the elections in Iraq in January are real elections, the freedom you save may be your own.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes and teaches at New York University. He has been to Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah during the siege in April. His latest book is "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond."
by Rahul Mahajan
Last October, when Vladimir Putin engineered the election of his hand-picked subordinate Ahmad Kadyrov as president of Chechnya through tactics such as pressuring the leading candidate, Malik Saidullayev, to withdraw (and then forcing him out with a court injunction) and hiring another candidate to be on his staff, Western punditry was not slow to condemn the election as a farce and a sham. It did so again when he interfered as blatantly in the recent August elections in Chechnya. Ever since 9/11, however, the Bush administration has been treating us to a series of equally farcical "elections" with minimal or no comment from the same sources. The matter has now come to what should be a crisis point over plans to engineer the upcoming U.N. Security Council-mandated elections in Iraq. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was once again in the news regarding his concerns that the main U.S.-affiliated political parties (the ones that formed the Governing Council and that now dominate the transitional assembly) are negotiating on a "consensus slate" of candidates for the elections. While his main reported concern is that the Shi'a majority of Iraq will be underrepresented, based on an estimate from the early 90's that 55% of the Iraqi population is Shi'a Arab compared to his estimate of 65% today, there is a much more serious question at stake - the legitimacy of the elections. In some countries, with a well-established parliamentary system and a history of active political parties and an inclusive public discourse, slates like this are not necessarily a problem. In systems like India's, with numerous parties and a first-past-the-post voting system (no matter how many candidates there are, the candidate with the most votes wins, with no runoffs), such electoral alliances may be necessary to get smaller parties some degree of parliamentary representation. In Iraq, however, this is simply a setup for a sham election. Let's look at the history of recent U.S. demonstration elections. In the June 2002 Afghan loya jirga, roughly 1500 delegates assembled to pick the interim president of the country. Although all delegates were under a great degree of pressure by U.S.-backed warlords (who did everything from killing delegates before the assembly to controlling the floor at the assembly), over 800 signed a statement in support of Zahir Shah, the exiled monarch. According to Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, delegates to the loya jirga, the United States then stepped in and "the entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former king was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the government." (NYT, 6/21/02) When the assembly resumed, delegates were given a choice between Hamid Karzai and two unknown candidates running for symbolic value (one of them was a woman) - essentially, as in the Chechnya elections, they were presented with a fait accompli. More recently, the Bush administration pushed to have Afghan elections before the U.S. elections, then switched around and pressured the Afghan Electoral Commission to delay the parliamentary elections until next April (CSM, 7/13/04) while going ahead with presidential elections in October. There has been no time for anyone in the country to emerge as a national rival to Karzai, so this will effectively be a one-candidate election with a veneer of democratic choice; the results of the parliamentary elections would not be nearly so predictable or controllable by the United States, and serendipitously they have been put off. In Iraq, the U.S. record is worse. Much propaganda has been made of the local "elections" instituted by U.S. forces, but to believe it calls for a willing disjunction from reality. In some places, the "election" was an appointment of mayor and/or city council members by the local U.S. commander, sometimes disastrously, as when U.S. forces appointed a Sunni from Baghdad to be mayor of the mostly Shi'a Najaf, cancelled an election he would surely have lost, and later had to remove him anyway because of charges of corruption and Ba'athist links (WP, 6/28/03, and others). In Basra, British and U.S. forces appointed local officials and then removed them and decided explicitly that Iraqis would only serve in a technocratic capacity, not a political one (WP, 5/29/03). In other places, like Kirkuk, the "election" was one conducted by 300 delegates all hand-picked and vetted by U.S. forces, not by the people of Kirkuk. In late June, U.S. commanders had ordered a halt to all local elections, because they had determined that in many places people and groups they didn't like were too popular and might win (WP, 6/28/03). That is unfortunately one of the problems with democracy. A few days later, Paul Bremer approved resumption of elections (WP, 7/1/03), but allowed local commanders to choose between appointment, election by specially vetted caucuses, and actual elections; unstated was the conclusion that U.S. commanders should choose the form of "election" based on the likelihood of getting the result they wanted. All of these experiments in "democracy" were, of course, in a context where U.S. commanders could countermand any city council decision and dissolve any council as they so chose. At the national level, things have been worse. Of course, elections have been postponed repeatedly, even though the difficulties that exist in Afghanistan did not exist in Iraq (for example, the ubiquitous ration cards could have been used as a basis for voter identification and registration); even the January elections are mandated only because other countries on the Security Council insisted on the setting of a date as a condition for approving Resolution 1546, on the so-called "transfer of sovereignty." But numerous other ostensibly national political processes have been cancelled or manipulated as well. An assembly planned for June 2003, that would have involved mostly the U.S.-designated exile-dominated "Iraqi opposition" was cancelled by Paul Bremer. He said it was because the "opposition" was not representative of the country; then, a month later he chose, entirely on his own authority, 25 people, 16 of them exiles, to form the Governing Council. In August, as the center of Najaf was ceaselessly bombarded, a national assembly of roughly 1300 delegates met to select the transitional national assembly, a body of 100 people whose formation was mandated by the "transfer of sovereignty" process (actually, 81 delegates were to be selected, the other 19 coming from the old Governing Council). Ostensibly picked by democratic processes in their locality, the delegates certainly did represent a wide variety of parties and views, although major groups opposed to the occupation were under-represented (Moqtada al-Sadr, whose organization was under military assault at the time, boycotted the conference). Imagine the surprise of the delegates when they came to the conference and found out that there would be no nomination of candidates, campaigning, or elections. Instead, they were confronted with a pre-selected slate of 81 candidates, picked by back-room negotiations between the major U.S.-affiliated (former Governing Council) parties, and expected to rubber-stamp it. Smaller parties made an attempt to come up with an opposition slate, but were unable to, and at the end the U.S.-backed slate was not even presented to the delegates for formal approval (AP, 8/18/04). This last sham would likely embarrass even Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the Bush administration is happy with elections in places it controls, like Afghanistan or Iraq, as long as there are no choices (when there are, as in Florida, strange things can happen). There is not a shred of a reason to doubt that this is precisely what is planned for the January elections in Iraq - collusion by the U.S.-backed political parties to pick Iraqi figures who will continue to collaborate with the occupation and to shut out all other Iraqi voices. There is a deplorable tendency in this country to use words like "freedom" and "democracy" in a purely talismanic manner, without attaching any actual meaning to them - only thus could the coups in Guatemala in 1954 or in Haiti in 2004 be hailed as advances for democracy. But the current administration, the Republican Party, and George W. Bush take this to heretofore undreamed of extremes, as could be seen clearly at the Republican National Convention this year. For Bush, apparently, democracy means any kind of election at all - a definition that would make Saddam Hussein perfectly happy (he won an "election" with an unprecedented 100% of the vote in October 2002). Or, more pointedly, to Bush, democracy and freedom mean "anything the United States does" and, even worse, "anything I do." The implications for the United States and its internal affairs ought to be as clear as the implications for Iraq. If you mobilize to ensure that the elections in Iraq in January are real elections, the freedom you save may be your own.
Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes and teaches at New York University. He has been to Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah during the siege in April. His latest book is "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond."
posted by BLONDIE at 9:53 AM
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