Iraq: Have The Elections Saved The Occupation?

[struggle4progress]

Rohan Pearce
Green Left Weekly

... (In) a January 29 panel on CNN's International Correspondents program, Julian Manyon, Britain's ITV Baghdad correspondent, revealed that Western TV reporters covering the election were being “limited to filming at only five polling stations”, out of 5244. When the list of “approved” polling stations was published, Manyon added, reporters found out that “four of those five polling stations are actually in Shia areas, and therefore by definition will shed very little light on whether Sunnis vote or not”. <snip>

The official estimate of the turnout is now 57%. However, this figure is based on registered, not eligible, Iraqi voters and is distorted by the high proportion of Kurdish voters in Iraq's northern region. Outside Iraq, only about 22% of potential expatriate voters cast a ballot.

During the polling there were reports of intimidation and the voting process was riddled with evidence of possible fraud. Independent Baghdad-based US journalist Dahr Jamail reported in an article for the Inter Press Service the day after the ballot: “Voting in Baghdad was linked with receipt of food rations ... many Iraqis said Monday that their names were marked on a list provided by the government agency that provides monthly food rations before they were allowed to vote.” <snip>

Jamail's and Bennis's assessment is confirmed by a Zogby International poll conducted January 19-23, which found that 69% of Shiite Iraqis and 82% of Sunnis “favor US forces withdrawing either immediately or after an elected government is in place”. <snip>

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0502/S00115.htm

[Jack Rabbit]

1. This warning needs to be heeded:

Once it becomes clear to those who voted in the January 30 elections that they have been deceived, that the elections will not quickly end the US-led occupation of their country, Washington and its Iraqi puppet regime will face a tremendous public backlash, greatly strengthening all the active forces of resistance to the occupation.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Naomi Klein (The Nation/Feb 10): Getting the Purple Finger

From The Nation
Dated Thursday February 10

Getting the Purple Finger
By Naomi Klein

The election results are in: Iraqis voted overwhelmingly to throw out the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi, who refused to ask the United States to leave. A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance; the second plank in the UIA platform calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq."

There are more single-digit messages embedded in the winning coalition's platform. Some highlights: "Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi...and offers facilities to citizens to build homes." The UIA also pledges "to write off Iraq's debts, cancel reparations and use the oil wealth for economic development projects." In short, Iraqis voted to repudiate the radical free-market policies imposed by former chief US envoy Paul Bremer and locked in by a recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

So will the people who got all choked up watching Iraqis flock to the polls support these democratically chosen demands? Please. "You don't set timetables," George W. Bush said four days after Iraqis voted for exactly that. Likewise, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the elections "magnificent" but dismissed a firm timetable out of hand. The UIA's pledges to expand the public sector, keep the oil and drop the debt will likely suffer similar fates. At least if Adel Abd al-Mahdi gets his way--he's Iraq's finance minister and the man suddenly being touted as leader of Iraq's next government.

Al-Mahdi is the Bush Administration's Trojan horse in the UIA. (You didn't think they were going to put all their money on Allawi, did you?) In October he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to "restructure and privatize state-owned enterprises," and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law "very promising to the American investors." It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF. On troop withdrawal, al-Mahdi sounds nothing like his party's platform and instead appears to be channeling Dick Cheney on Fox News: "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections." But on Sharia law, we are told, he is very close to the clerics.

Read more.

This piece is also discussed on the long thread, although there as simply a discussion on whether the Iraq election is a repudiation of the US occupation by the Iraqi people (as I maintain) or something else (as cantwealljustgetalong asserts).

This angle of the elections, in which the US placed "Trojan horses" in the Shia slate and will deny the Iraqi people their desire to take control of their own country and settle their own affairs.