Action
Press release
Background information on the elections in Iraq

'Iraq's Election: the occupation continues'
12 noon 30 January photocall outside the US embassy [Grosvenor Sq. W1] followed by leafleting on Oxford St.

30 Jan will see the first nationwide elections in Iraq since the invasion, but whoever Iraqis vote for this election won’t enable them to change the single most important political fact in their lives: the military occupation of their country by a foreign power.

Since the occupation will continue, so will all that entails: more bombed cities, more dead civilians, more human rights abuses, more resistance, more maimed and brutalised soldiers, and the ever-increasing likelihood of civil war in Iraq.

Please join us on the 30th Jan to demand an end to the occupation - a necessary
precondition for any genuinely free and fair election in Iraq.

For more info. contact voices: 0845 458 2564, voices@voicesuk.org


BACKGROUND INFO
Iraq's elections: whoever wins, the occupation continues - from the Voices newsletter
Iraq's Non-Election - a recent powerful commentary on the process
by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood
Also see the comprehensive in-depth briefing from the Project for Defence Alternatives (the full 28-page report is available on-line at http://www.comw.org/pda/0501br17.html).


IRAQ'S ELECTIONS: WHOEVER WINS, THE OCCUPATION CONTINUES
Excerpted from the Voices UK newsletter 39, Jan 2005

30 January will see the first nationwide election in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, but whoever Iraqis vote for – if they vote at all - the occupation is set to continue, with all that that entails (see p.2-5). Fundamentally, this election does not allow Iraqis to change the single most important political fact in their lives: the military occupation of their country by a foreign power.

$200 BILLION AND COUNTING
Indeed, having already spent well over $100bn on the invasion and occupation of Iraq (FT, 14 Jan) – and with Bush expected to request a further $80bn in February (AFP, 4 Jan) – the US is not about to voluntarily withdraw before it has achieved its objectives - most notably control over the world’s second largest proven oil reserves.

A REASSURING "PRESENCE"
Nor is the new government – expected to be dominated by parties of the Shia majority - likely to be in a position to ask US troops to leave any time soon. Like its predecessor, it will be dependent upon the US military presence for its survival. Indeed, as the FT reports, ‘US leverage rests upon awareness among the Shia that their government is unlikely to survive a civil war without continued US support’ (13 Jan) and the main Shi’ite slate - expected to obtain a large proportion of votes - was forced to announce its list ‘in the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad, protected by US soldiers’ (Independent on Sunday, 19 Dec).

According to the overall commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen John Abizaid, ‘A USled multinational force w[ill] have to remain for some time beyond [2005]… to provide a back-up to Iraqi forces in case of dire emergency… and provid[e] a reassuring “presence”’ (Telegraph, 8 Dec).

‘RED LINES’
Iraq expert and Independent Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn notes that the 30 January election is ‘n[ot]…likely to see a shift in authority from the US to Iraqis’ (Independent on Sunday, 19 Dec).

The poll will use a national system of proportional representation to elect a 275- member legislative ‘National Assembly’. However, Iraqis will not get a chance to vote for the new Government’s executive – where whatever real power the new government possesses will lie. Instead the Assembly will select a 3-person Presidency Council, which will in turn select a Prime Minister – a process over which the US is likely to be able to exert a good deal of pressure.

On 19 Dec Reuters reported that Iraqi officials were privately suggesting that the current US-appointed PM – former CIA asset, Ayad Allawi – was ‘considered the front runner’ for the Premiership in the new government. A ‘senior official from a leading Shi’ite party’ was quoted as saying that, “There is simply no one else on whom the assembly could reach consensus. Kurds would rather deal with Allawi than an Islamist Shi’ite, so would Sunnis. We also realise an Islamist Shi’ite prime minister is a red line for the Americans.”

‘PALATABLE TO WASHINGTON’
Washington undoubtedly has ‘red lines’ but they probably have more to do with obedience than religion. Thus, while one anonymous US official – identified as ‘an expert on the Middle East’ – recently told the FT that the US was “[n]ow … willing to countenance a limited theocracy in Iraq” (3 Dec), ‘[a] US official who declined to be named’ told Reuters that while ‘he did not know of a deal to bring Allawi back … it was clear any Iraqi prime minister would have to be palatable to Washington’ (Reuters, 19 Dec)

Among the other names ‘circulating in Washington as a likely prime minister’ (FT, 3 Dec) is that of the current Finance Minister Adel Abd al-Mahdi – a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Al-Mahdi recently announced that the current leadership were ‘looking at privatising the Iraqi National Oil Company’ and rolling back the food ration system – upon which many Iraqi families still depend for their survival - in accord with its recent agreement with the IMF (Inter Press Service, 23 Dec). Judging by this recent performance Mr al-Mahdi sounds like the sort of Islamist that Washington can
do business with.

THE VOTE
As we have seen, the nature of the new Government is to be constrained by Washington’s ‘red lines’ and what the US is willing to ‘countenance.’ Furthermore the new PM – the most powerful position in the new government – must be someone ‘palatable to Washington.’ Setting these substantive issues to one side though, even a meaningful vote at the purely formal level looks unlikely.

Thus the commander of US ground forces in Iraq, Lt Gen. Thomas Metz, recently admitted that ‘security conditions in four Iraqi provinces militated against holding elections’ (USAToday.com, 12 Jan). These four provinces include Baghdad, and between them house as much as half of Iraq’s population. Furthermore, because of security concerns, ‘[i]n many cases the names of those who wish to hold public office are not actually available and will be shown only on request inside the polling station on election day’ (Times, 14 Jan).

Meanwhile, ‘most international experts assessing the fairness of Iraq’s elections will monitor the vote from the safety of neighbouring Jordan’ (AP, 24 Dec) and US forces have launched 'the largest military operation in Iraq since the 2003 invasion ... fanning across the country to secure [sic] the election ... flooding soldiers into areas where previously there were no coalition troops' (Sunday Telegraph, 23 Jan)

CIVIL WAR?
Iraqis themselves are split over the election. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani - the most senior Shi’a religious figure in Iraq, who commands enormous respect amongst Iraqi Shi’ites - has issued a religious ruling requiring every man and woman to vote, ‘elevat[ing] the duty to vote to the same level as fasting during Ramadan and praying five times a day - among the five most sacred obligations for observant Muslims’ (Los Angeles Times, 22 Nov). A Shia electrical engineer from Baghdad told the Guardian that he would “vote even if I die, because I know I will be considered as a martyr because of [Sistani’s] edict” (20 Dec).

By contrast, an internal US State Department poll conducted in December, found that only 32% of Iraqi Sunnis were “very likely” to vote, with only 12% believing that the poll will be “completely free and fair” and 88% saying that they “w[ill] stay home if there are threats of violence against polling stations” (AFP, 11 Jan). The Iraqi Islamic Party, ‘one of the few influential groups to [have] put forward a slate of Sunni candidates,’ is now calling for a boycott (USAToday.com, 28 Dec) and ‘[i]nsurgents have repeatedly threatened to disrupt the elections and…kill electoral officials…post[ing] letters on the walls of Sunni areas threatening to kill anyone participating in the voting process, describing it as being illegitimate’ (Guardian, 20 Dec).

Sectarian attacks have also been conducted against the Shia, including the murder of one of Sistani’s aides (NYT, 15 Jan). If, as seems likely, Sunnis cannot – or will not – vote, and end up grossly underrepresented in the Assembly (which is supposed to draft a permanent constitution) the US occupation could end up being transformed into a civil war: a nightmare option for Iraqis, though not necessarily, one suspects, for the US.

IRAQ'S NON-ELECTION by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood; January 28, 2005

Predictably, the U.S. news media are full of discussion and debate about this weekend’s election in Iraq. Unfortunately, virtually all the commentary misses a simple point: There will be no “election” on Jan. 30 in Iraq, if that term is meant to suggest an even remotely democratic process.

Many Iraqis casting votes will be understandably grateful for the opportunity. But the conditions under which those votes will be cast -- as well as the larger context -- bear more similarity to a slowly unfolding hostage tragedy than an exercise in democracy. We refer not to the hostages taken by various armed factions in Iraq, but the way in which U.S. policymakers are holding the entire Iraqi population hostage to U.S. designs for domination of the region.

This is an election that U.S. policymakers were forced to accept and now hope can entrench their power, not displace it. They seek not an election that will lead to a U.S. withdrawal, but one that will bolster their ability to make a case for staying indefinitely.

This is crucial for anti-empire activists to keep in mind as the mainstream media begins to give us pictures of long lines at polling places to show how much Iraqis support this election and to repeat the Bush administration line about bringing freedom to a part of the world starved for democracy. Those media reports also will give some space to those critics who remain comfortably within the permissible ideological limits -- that is, those who agree that the U.S. aim is freedom for Iraq and, therefore, are allowed to quibble with a few minor aspects of administration policy.

The task of activists who step outside those limits is to point out a painfully obvious fact, and therefore one that is unspeakable in the mainstream: A real election cannot go on under foreign occupation in which the electoral process is managed by the occupiers who have clear preferences in the outcome.

That’s why the U.S.-funded programs that “nurture” the voting process have to be implemented “discreetly,” in the words of a Washington Post story, to avoid giving the Iraqis who are “well versed in the region’s widely held perception of U.S. hegemony” further reason to mistrust the assumed benevolent intentions of the United States.

Post reporters Karl Vick and Robin Wright quote an Iraqi-born instructor from one of these training programs: “If you walk into a coffee shop and say, ‘Hi, I’m from an American organization and I’m here to help you,’ that’s not going to help. If you say you’re here to encourage democracy, they say you’re here to control the Middle East.”

Perhaps “they” -- those well-versed Iraqis -- say that because it is an accurate assessment of policy in the Bush administration, as well as every other contemporary U.S. administration. “They” dare to suggest that the U.S. goal is effective control over the region’s oil resources. But “we” in the United States are not supposed to think, let alone say, such things; that same Post story asserts, without a hint of sarcasm, that the groups offering political training in Iraq (the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, International Republican Institute, and International Foundation for Election Systems) are “at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world.”

Be still my heart. To fulfill that ambition, U.S. troop strength in Iraq will remain at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army’s top operations officer. For the past two years, journalists have reported about U.S. intentions to establish anywhere from four to 14 “enduring” military bases in Iraq. Given that there are about 890 U.S. military installations around the world to provide the capacity to project power in service of the U.S. political and economic agenda, it’s not hard to imagine that planners might be interested in bases in the heart of the world’s most important energy-producing region.

But in mainstream circles, such speculation relegates one to the same category as those confused Middle Easterners with their “widely held perception of U.S. hegemony.” After all, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed as “inaccurate and unfortunate” any suggestion that the United States seeks a permanent presence in Iraq. In April 2003, Rumsfeld assured us that there has been “zero discussion” among senior administration officials about permanent bases in Iraq.

But let’s return to reality: Whatever the long-term plans of administration officials, the occupation of Iraq has, to put it mildly, not gone as they had hoped. But rather than abandon their goals, they have adapted tactics and rhetoric. Originally the United States proposed a complex caucus system to try to avoid elections and make it easier to control the selection of a government, but the Iraqis refused to accept that scheme. Eventually U.S. planners had to accept elections and now are attempting to turn the chaotic situation on the ground to their advantage.

Ironically, the instability and violence may boost the chances of the United States’ favored candidate, U.S.-appointed interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. While most electoral slates are unable to campaign or even release their candidates’ names because of the violence, Allawi can present himself as a symbol of strength, running an expensive television campaign while protected by security forces. He has access to firepower and reconstruction funds, which may prove appealing to many ordinary Iraqis who, understandably, want the electricity to flow and the kidnappings and violence to stop.

Of course the United States can’t guarantee the favored candidate will prevail. But whoever is in the leadership slot in Iraq will understand certain unavoidable realities of power. As the New York Times put it -- in the delicate fashion appropriate to the Times -- the recent announcement by Shi’a leaders that any government it forms would not be overtly Islamic was partly in response to Iraqi public opinion. But, as reporter Dexter Filkins reminded readers, U.S. officials “wield vast influence” and “would be troubled by an overtly Islamist government.” And no one wants troubled U.S. officials, even Iraqi nationalists who hate the U.S. occupation but can look around and see who has the guns.

The realities on the ground may eventually mean that even with all those guns, the United States cannot impose a pro-U.S. government in Iraq. It may have to switch strategies again. But, no matter how many times Bush speaks of his fondness for freedom and no matter what games the planners play, we should not waver in an honest analysis of the real motivations of policymakers. To pretend that the United States might, underneath it all, truly want a real democracy in Iraq -- one that actually would be free to follow the will of the people -- is to ignore evidence, logic and history.

As blogger Zeynep Toufe put it: “All these precious words have now become something akin to brand names: “democracy,” “freedom,” “liberty,” “empowerment.” They don’t really mean anything; they’re just the names attached to things we do.” http://www.underthesamesun.org/

Right now, one of the things that U.S. policymakers do is to allow Iraqis to cast ballots under extremely constrained conditions. But whatever the results on Jan. 30, it will not be an election, if by “election” we mean a process through which people have a meaningful opportunity to select representatives who can set public policy free of external constraint. The casting of ballots will not create a legitimate Iraqi government. Such a government is possible only when Iraqis have real control over their own future. And that will come only when the United States is gone.

Robert Jensen is on the board and Pat Youngblood is coordinator of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, TX. http://thirdcoastactivist.org They can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and pat@thirdcoastactivist.org.