Who Selects the Iraqi Candidates?

[Zoe]

Reuters has this news item about a Time magazine article. I don’t know if the link is temporary.

Excerpt:

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving the Bush administration flawed information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons program, will visit Washington in November amid speculation that U.S. officials view him as an acceptable candidate for Iraqi prime minister.

The longtime Iraqi exile began attracting U.S. attention as a potential prime minister after Washington decided Iraq’s current premier, Ibrahim Jaafari, had discredited himself by seeking overly friendly relations with Iran, Time said, quoting unnamed administration officials.

State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez denied the United States has any preferences. “What we’ve been saying all along is that this is an Iraqi process. The Iraqi people will determine who their representatives are,” he said.

Are we involved in determining who will be the candidates? The winners of the election? Who has determined that Jaafari is unacceptable? (Sorry if I have forgotten old news.)

How did Chilabi get back in our good graces? Is the White House saying now that he didn’t give us bad intelligence after all? Then who did?

[Kimstu]

In the transitional-government elections in January 2005, candidates were selected by Iraqi political parties (usually built around a common ethnic and/or religious identity). Most of them, however, campaigned anonymously, identified only by party affiliation, for fear of assassination attempts.

As to whether the US attempted to influence the elections by supporting particular candidates or parties, this was apparently a strongly debated issue in the Bush Administration. The difficulty was that we wanted the Iraqis to have free and independent elections, but at the same time we didn’t want controlling power to go to the heavily Iranian-influenced Shi`a parties that had majority popular support among the Iraqis:

“There was a question at a principals’ meeting about whether we should try and change the vote,” [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] 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. […]

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?”

We’re faced with the same dilemma in the upcoming December 2005 elections. Theoretically, the choice of candidates is strictly the business of the Iraqi political parties that nominate them, and our duty is to butt out and not interfere with that process. Practically speaking, though, we want Iraqis in power who will be friendly to us and will govern on the democratic principles that we promised to bring to Iraq.

What exactly our leaders are doing to resolve this dilemma, I don’t know.

[Zoe]

Kimstu, many thanks for your help in sorting through this. And it still quacks like a duck, doesn’t it?

It’s mind boggling that so many things are going wrong that there isn’t enough time on 24 hour news to cover this in detail.

Imagine. I thought that everything would be boring when Watergate was over.