Such high standards were not met, however. Just how much of a departure from normal democratic procedures the Iraqi “election” was may be grasped from the following facts:
1. There were 7,785 candidates, and yet not even 50 of their names were known to the voting public.
2. There were no separate parties on the ballot, but only a number of lists made up of a number of parties whose participation in such lists was generally unknown.
3. There were no truly international observers.
4. There was no independent and impartial monitor to scrutinize the voting process, the integrity of the ballots, or the ballot count.
5. The only observers present were trained by groups like the National Democratic Institute, which had a direct and vested interest in ensuing a “positive result” for the authorities.
6. The UN election body was based not in the country but 200 miles away in a neighboring country.
7. There was a widespread curfew imposed on the eve of the election, and dozens of leading and influential figures, who denounced the “elections” under occupation conditions, were arrested for their opinions.1
Now some of these factors, such as the presence or absence of international observers, would not invalidate an election taking place in a Western country, for the good reason that Western democratic structures have been in place for centuries. In the case of Iraq, however, we are talking of “fledgling democracies” and the mere planting of seeds, where every detail must be (and should have been) legitimate in order to give the process essential credibility, which would otherwise be lacking in a society not accustomed to foreign “democratic traditions.”
The Fourth Estate
One way that the authorities might have provided some credibility for the process would have been to allow open and widespread media coverage of the event. Nevertheless, the decision was made to allow only large, approved networks to film in a very limited number of places. “The officially designated satellite companies were al-Arabiyah Satellite Network, the Iraqi Qanat ash-Sharqiyah – the Iraqi “government” TV station – and the American CNN,” according to a Free Arab Voice report.1 It continued by reporting that correspondents for the officially registered Mafkarat alIslam challenged Iraqi and American officials to deny that coverage was limited to these “approved” networks, but no one did so.
Robert Fisk, writing before the vote, adds some detail to the picture:
The big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations where they will be “allowed” to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shiite Muslim areas – where the polling will probably be high – and one in an upmarket Sunni area, where it will be moderate ….
… every working class Sunni polling station will be out of bounds to the press. I wonder if the television lads will tell us that today when they show voters “flocking” to the polls. In the Karada district, we found three truckloads of youths on Saturday, all brandishing Iraqi flags, all – like the unemployed who have been sticking posters to Baghdad's walls – paid by the government to “advertise” the election. And there was a cameraman from Iraqi State television, of course, which is controlled by Iyad Allawi's “interim” government.2
Coercion and the Count
One can be forgiven for suspecting that, had an election of this nature, with conditions of “objectivity” and procedural regularity as obviously deficient as in the Iraqi election, been held in a Western country, the reaction would have been cynical and unenthusiastic – and productive of a correspondingly low turnout – even in the face of massive media hype. Some would argue, however, that the allegedly “high” turnout in the Iraqi election proved such a suspicion to be unfounded. On the surface it's a fine point, but deeper analysis shows that things are not what they seem. The “high” turnout is clearly matter for debate, and whatever turnout there was may actually have been produced by coercion and intimidation.
The turnout has, of course, been hailed by journalists in the Anglo-American world. It has been claimed that the high turnout proves the yearning of Iraqis for “democracy,” and is therefore justification alone for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Never mind that nobody in the White House or on Downing Street was talking about “democracy” in the long run-up to the attack on Iraq. It is a fact that has been quietly dropped.
Happily, a few in the press were watching with a skeptical eye. Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, a watchdog publication covering the print media, pointed out the way in which the main assertions regarding the election turnout were swallowed whole by the mainstream media, implicitly suggesting that the claimed figures didn't completely add up.
In hailing, and at times gushing, over the turnout has the American media – as it did two years ago in the hyping of Saddam's WMDs – forgotten core journalistic principles in regard to fact-checking and weighing partisan assertions? It appears so.1
The reason for caution is that initially the media announced the statement from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) that 72% of eligible voters turned out for the election. This figure was then rather quickly downgraded to 57%.2 From then on the line was rigorously maintained that eight million Iraqis had voted and the turnout was in fact 57%. The question is, of course, 57% of what?
What is the population of Iraq? No one knows precisely. According to “some experts” it is 25 million or so; according to “other experts” it is 27.1 million. A discrepancy of some two million or more people – roughly 10% of the expert-estimated population – is hardly to be scoffed at.
Of this unclear population total, how many people were eligible to vote? According to the mainstream media, the number of eligible voters was 14 million. Yet Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post, pointed out that the number of adults in Iraq is closer to 18 million.1 Nevertheless, in most of the media coverage of the event, no one seemed to know if the 14 million figure quoted was merely “registered” voters, adults over the age of 18, or what. Kurtz told Mitchell, who interviewed him for his Editor & Publisher piece, that even if his own estimate of 18 million adults was questionable (though it is based on work by Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution), “the 14 million, the baseline, is a very fuzzy figure because there was no registration.” Others raised the same question. Sami Ramdani noted in a piece the British Guardian, UN sources weren't able to explain how the number of people eligible to vote was arrived at or what it really signified:
[W]hat percentage of the adult population is registered to vote? The Iraqi ambassador in London was unable to enlighten me. In fact, as UN sources confirm, there has been no registration or published list of electors – all we are told is that about 14 million people were entitled to vote.2
Now if the total population is not known, the number of eligible voters is not known, the basis for determining what makes a voter eligible is not known, and the number of registered voters is not known, discussing what percentage of the population turned out to vote is meaningless: it is like trying to do math without numbers! Kurtz actually notes in his piece for the Post that “election officials concede they did not have a reliable baseline on which to calculate turnout.” If that is so, what faith can one put in any of the official declarations?
Nonetheless, the line from Baghdad and Washington has consistently been that 8 million people voted, and that this constituted a turnout of 57%.
Let's look at the 8 million figure, particularly as broken down by Mitchell's Editor & Publisher piece. The press initially quoted Farid Ayar, the spokesman for the IECI, as saying that “as many as 8 million” voted; this quickly became “about 8 million” in the media, and then, inevitably, simply “8 million.” John Burns and Dexter Filkins, writing for the New York Times on the Friday after the election, reported that election officials had begun backtracking on the turnout “saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country.”1 What is remarkable
about the “about 8 million” figure of Ayar, again following Mitchell's analysis, is that it corresponded perfectly with what he said the day before the election. Then, he suggested that between 7 and 8 million would turn out to vote, a prediction that might have given him some incentive to later find numbers that matched his forecast. Then again, if 8 million were expected to vote, Mitchell asks, why was the actual turnout greeted with such surprise?
As for the “57% turnout,” Howard Kurtz points out in the Post that while the 14 million figure was the number of those said to be registered voters, in a normal election the turnout is calculated not on the number of registered voters but on the number of eligible voters. There is a huge difference, one which Greg Mitchell illustrated admirably:
If say, for example, 50,000 residents of a city registered and 25,000 voted, that would seem like a very respectable 50% turnout, by one standard. But if the adult population of the city was 150,000, then the actual turnout of 16% would look quite different.
So if there were really 18 million eligible voters, and not just 14 million, the 8 million turnout counts for only 45% – less than half of the potential voters, quite different both politically and psychologically. And again this does not take into account the fact that the 8 million figure is doubtful at best – based upon a number of questions about the quality of the election in many technical and practical respects.
How many of those dealing with election figures outside of Iraq knew the difference between voter registration and voter eligibility? How many journalists drew their attention to the difference? Not without reason, then, did Robert Wiener, a Clinton White House veteran, declare: “It's an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I'm sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin.”2
If the actual turnout was questionable, the way in which those who did vote were brought to the polls was no less so. The Iraqi Election Commission approved the use of the country's food-ration cards as the means by which all Iraqis would register and vote. Under pressure from the U.S. to speed the election process along, the Commission opted not to complete a comprehensive, nationwide census to determine voter eligibility – something that should have been mandatory for an election of this size and importance, and indeed for any election that wished to be seen as legitimate.
Perhaps ironically, it was Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party which first created the food-rations system in 1991. In an effort to limit the devastating effects of UN sanctions, the Ba'ath Party issued a card to every Iraqi citizen, which entitled them to receive a free monthly ration of wheat, sugar, and other staples.
Throughout the nineties, as the situation became more dire, the food-ration cards constituted one of the few things Iraqis could rely on to make their daily lives tolerable. When the time came for Iraqis to vote in January 2005, one can only wonder what kind of internal discord many felt as they ventured forward with their precious food-ration card to choose leaders who would replace the very figures who produced the card.
Many Iraqis apparently voted only because they were convinced that their food rations might be cut if they failed to do so.
According Al-Basa'ir, a weekly publication of the Iraqi Muslim Scholars Council, people were expecting to have their 2004 ration cards renewed at the end of that year, as had occurred regularly for over a decade. But December came and went “without the Iraqis reading in the local papers or hearing in audio-visual media any mention of any invitation calling on them to replace these cards. This gave rise to many rumors as to why the issuance of these cards was delayed.”1
Al-Basa'ir believed that the only plausible reason Iraqis found for the delay was that
the government intends to withhold these cards from the families that will not participate in the elections. Many Iraqis affirm that the new ration card has been printed and that it will be distributed to the head of the family while he votes, and that those who do not go to the polling stations will not get their cards, and therefore will not receive the staples that are covered by the card, as a punishment.2
By late January, many Iraqis were convinced that their food supplies might be jeopardized if they did not show up for the vote. Amin Hajar, a small businessman from Baghdad, said, “I'll vote because I can't afford to have my food ration cut … if that happened, me and my family would starve to death.”3
Saeed Jodhet, a 21-year-old Iraqi engineering student, had reason to believe he would lose out as well. “Two food dealers I know told me personally that our food rations would be withheld if we did not vote,” he said.1
It matters little if such fears were without foundation. Large numbers of Iraqis believed them possible and took no chances on losing out. Given such a level of duress among the populace, one must question the validity of the choices made on election day.
Voting Day: What Else Was Fishy?
As if the questions about the actual turnout and the coercive methods by which it was achieved weren't enough to raise serious objections to the conduct of the election, other reports shortly after the elections revealed remarkably low turnouts in specific regions, as well as dubious voters and questionable voting practices in others. For instance:
• A mere 1,400 people voted in the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra, which boasts a population of over 200,000. This 1,400 included Iraqi soldiers and police, “most of whom were recruited from the [Shiite] south.”2
• Four days after the election the New York Times was reporting that – with 60% of the count completed – turnout in Mosul, with its “diverse” population of Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and more, was slightly above 10%, or “somewhat more than 50,000 of Mosul's 500,000 estimated eligible voters.”3 The figure calls into question the refrain that maintains only Sunnis questioned, and therefore boycotted, the election.
• Of eligible Iraqis abroad, only 20% voted, according to the above-noted statement of the International Action Center. This gives the lie to the assertion that turnout was low in many areas simply because of security concerns.
• A correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that, according to the High Commission for Elections, the al-Karradah district of Baghdad was supposed to have 22,000 eligible voters. Of these only 700 voted. What makes this fact of particular interest is that the district is predominantly Christian, and not Sunni – which means that these too were unenthusiastic for the occupation and its political machinery.1
• Members of Ahmad Chalabi's party were seen escorting non-Iraqis to one polling station and issuing them false Iraqi citizenship certificates. In the span of just five minutes four people were observed participating in this counterfeit vote.2
• At another polling place every person who entered the site was asked to vote for a specific candidate. In some cases, according to one observer, election workers would actually mark the ballot form for the voter.3
• In another instance, armed men forced voters to cast their votes for a particular group, namely, the UIA.4
• In the north, Jalal Talabani's Kurdish PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) encouraged people to vote by distributing money and transistor radios to potential voters.5
• There was also a case in the north (quite possibly not unique) of a village that was supposed to have had 850 eligible voters, according to the authorities, but which managed to generate 4,500 votes. This fact was made known to the Arab Monitor news service by Hassan al-Zarqani, a representative of Moqtada al-Sadr.
Still other irregularities included insufficient ballots, votes cast without proper registration, polling stations not opening, pre-marked ballots, and multiple election cards.6 Given the history of American government manipulation or staging of elections, going all the way back to Vietnam, it seems reasonable to assert that these elections, considered from an impartial and objective standpoint, cannot be considered credible.
The Results
According to the High Commission for Elections, 146 of the seats in the Transitional National Assembly went to members of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). The Kurdish al
liance was second with 75 seats, and Iyad Allawi's “Iraqi List” – the presumed favorite of Washington – was third with only 40 seats. The remaining 20 seats went to nine smaller parties.
Interestingly, according to a report in the British Independent, Reuters reported a few hours before the election results were officially announced, on February 13, that “the United Iraqi Alliance said today it had been told by Iraq's Electoral Commission that it had won around 60 percent of the vote in the country's election.”1 The Independent report continued:
This was later confirmed by the former U.S. chief UNSCOM weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who announced to a packed meeting in Washington State on 19 February that the United Iraqi Alliance actually gained 56 percent of the vote, and that “an official involved in the manipulation was the source.”
The significance of this voting maneuver is revealed in a Washington Post report (14 February): “A senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 per cent vote won by the [Shiite] slate deprives it of an outright majority. 'If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation.'”
What makes the alleged 48% obtained by the al-Sistani-backed list of UIA Shiite parties even more suspicious is the fact that Shiites are supposed to comprise 60% of the population. Even more stunning is the fact that the leaders of the UIA – al-Jaafari and al-Hakim – did not complain about the inordinate delay in proclaiming the alleged results.
Neo-Conned! Again Page 106
