[Media-watch] Controversial US Groups operate behind scenes on Iraq vote - The NewStandard - 13/12/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=1311



Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote



by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke (bio) and Brian Dominick (bio)



Washington-funded organizations are hard at work providing assistance to 
political campaigns in the lead up to next month's nationwide elections, but 
critics suggest their participation is anything but benevolent.
Dec 13 - Even as the White House decries the ominous prospect of Iranian 
influence on the upcoming Iraqi national elections, US-funded organizations 
with long records of manipulating foreign democracies in the direction of 
Washington's interests are quietly but deeply involved in essentially every 
aspect of the process.

"As should be clear, the electoral process will be an Iraqi process 
conducted by Iraqis for Iraqis," declared United Nations special envoy, 
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, in a September 14 statement to the Security Council. 
"It cannot be anything else."

But in actuality, influential, US-financed agencies describing themselves as 
"pro-democracy" but viewed by critics as decidedly anti-democratic, have 
their hands all over Iraq's transitional process, from the formation of 
political parties to monitoring the January 30 nationwide polls and possibly 
conducting exit polls that could be used to evaluate the fairness of the 
ballot-casting.

Two such groups -- the National Democratic Institute for International 
Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) -- are part 
of a consortium of non-governmental organizations to which the United States 
has provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in 
post-Saddam Iraq.

Both groups publicly assert they are non-partisan, but each has extremely 
close ties to its namesake American political party, and both are deeply 
partial to the perceived national interests of their home country, despite 
substantial involvement in the politics of numerous sovereign nations 
worldwide.

NDI is headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who took over 
the chair from former president Jimmy Carter. Republican Senator John McCain 
chairs IRI. Both groups have highly controversial reputations and are 
described throughout much of the world as either helpful, meddlesome, or 
downright subversive, depending on who you ask. In some places their work 
has earned praise from independent grassroots democracy advocates, but in 
many Third World republics, both groups have been tied to alleged covert 
plans to install US-favored governments.

The groups' separate but overlapping mandates in Iraq include educating 
Iraqis on the democratic process, training Iraqi organizations to monitor 
the elections and deal with electoral conflicts, and providing impartial 
advice and training to political parties, according to the US Agency for 
International Development (USAID), the official governmental organ funding 
the consortium's operations in Iraq. USAID contracts with and provides 
grants to private organizations that uphold its objectives, which include, 
according to the Agency's own literature, "furthering America's foreign 
policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets while improving the 
lives of citizens in the developing world."

Far from the United Nations' mission to oversee the election process itself, 
the American groups are actively engaged in cultivating political parties, 
and IRI appears to be working most heavily with parties and politicians 
favored by Washington.

Critics have expressed alarm, if not surprise, that policies carried out in 
other countries over the past two decades appear to be repeating in occupied 
Iraq. "USAID has learned that 'legitimate' leaders are not just found, 
they're made," wrote Herbert Docena, a research associate specializing in 
Iraq at the Bangkok-based activist think tank, Focus on the Global South. 
"Before the US withdraws from the scene, it first has to ensure that its 
Iraqis will know what to do."

According to Docena, USAID's activity in Iraq, as carried out by 
non-governmental proxies, is drawn straight out of the Agency's handbook, 
which advocates "capitalizing on national openings" and "[taking] advantage 
of national-level targets of opportunity" as they emerge, all while looking 
for a "strategic doorway" -- called an "entry point" -- that enables an 
Agency project to "anchor its program and optimize overall impact" in a 
target area.

"In Iraq, the 'entry point' was the invasion," Docena explained. "The 
'national opening' was the collapsed state left in its wake."

In October, Reuters obtained documents from the US State Department 
suggesting that the parties benefiting from US support of the Iraqi 
political process would be limited to those considered by the US to be 
"democratic or moderate," and that the Department was spending $1 million on 
polling to determine "which candidates and parties are attracting the most 
support from the Iraqi people."

According to the documents, Washington will provide "strategic advice, 
technical assistance, training, polling data, assistance, and other forms of 
support" to "moderate, democratically oriented political parties."

Such US-backed groups, including the Islamic Dawa Party and the Supreme 
Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI), which now dominate the 
100-member National Council selected amid controversy last August, 
participated in a series of six "training conferences" hosted by IRI this 
June.

According to IRI's website, the prominent parties were joined at the 
training by dozens of small and medium-sized organizations. "Topics ranged 
from candidate leadership skills to platform development," reads the group's 
report, "thus offering emerging Iraqi civic and political organizations a 
chance to learn a full array of successful campaign techniques. Results were 
promising -- participants expressed great enthusiasm during the proceedings 
and many actively pursued closer working relationships with the Institute."

Representatives of IRI would not speak with TNS on the record, but the group's 
website page on Iraq -- which does not appear to have been updated since 
early summer -- suggests IRI was involved in organizing last August's 
National Conference, purportedly held to elect an interim assembly that 
would oversee Iraq's current interim government. That event was widely 
viewed as a calamity, not least because no vote ever took place. IRI would 
not comment on its involvement in the Conference or even evaluate its 
success on the record.

Other IRI programs have employed a "top-down approach," the group's website 
states, providing instruction specifically for Iraq's interim governing 
bodies, from the original Governing Council to the present administration. 
Such a policy would appear to offer those already in power, mostly US-backed 
parties, a disproportionate share of IRI's resources and a precedent of 
involvement not shared with Iraq's fledgling opposition parties.

IRI's relationship with parties dominating Iraq's interim government raises 
the question of how much influence the American group has had in determining 
the makeup of current coalitions being formed to vie for the 275-seat 
National Assembly come January 30, which will in turn select a new 
government and write Iraq's permanent constitution.

Unlike its counterpart, NDI spoke at length with The NewStandard. Insisting 
that NDI's advice does not favor any of Iraq's numerous political parties 
over any others, Les Campbell, the organization's regional director for the 
Middle East and Africa, said, "We work with all the parties, including the 
big and well-known ones, but we actually . spend special efforts to find, 
for example, Sunni parties -- ones that might represent the Sunni 
population."

Campbell estimated that NDI's contributions are probably disproportionately 
helpful to the more obscure, less experienced Iraqi parties -- the ones that 
need assistance at nearly every level. "We have spent special effort trying 
to find people and parties that might reflect the views of the urban, sort 
of secular intellectuals," Campbell said, "because we think that they are 
disadvantaged."

Nevertheless, Campbell was careful to point out that NDI officially has no 
interest in the outcome of the Iraqi elections. "I have no idea, and nor do 
we ever really worry about whether or not our assistance has any affect on 
the [elections'] outcome," he said. "We're not even slightly 
outcome-oriented."

Both NDI and IRI say they are maintaining low profiles in Iraq primarily for 
the security of their staff and the Iraqis to whom they provide political 
assistance. But Campbell said there are other reasons, at least for NDI, 
that they do not stand out as a defining feature of the transition to 
democracy in Iraq. "We're not an organization that generally seeks credit," 
Campbell insisted. "We always perceive ourselves to be standing behind and 
supporting people. We're not trying to lead the parade anywhere; and we're 
certainly not trying to lead the parade in Iraq."

Critics of the work carried out elsewhere by NDI and IRI are concerned that 
the groups' low profiles in Iraq are not driven just by security or 
institutional modesty. Professor and author William I. Robinson of the 
Global and International Studies Program at the University of California, 
Santa Barbara calls groups like NDI and IRI "extensions" of the US State 
Department.

Robinson agrees with Campbell that groups like NDI are in danger in Iraq to 
the extent they are identified with the United States government. But 
according to Robinson, who has researched and written extensively on US 
foreign political and economic policies, the perception of an alignment 
between the US government and private organizations it funds is well 
deserved.

"I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are . trying to select individual leaders and 
organizations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational 
project for Iraq," Robinson said. He described those actors as willing to 
engage in "pacifying the country militarily and legitimating the occupation 
and the formal electoral system." Robinson added that developing 
relationships with "economic, political and civic groups that are going to 
be favorable to Iraq's integration into the global capitalist economy" would 
prove even more important for US-based organizations in the long run.

This would include, Robinson said, altering Iraq's political and economic 
infrastructure to be more open to international trade and investment, as 
well as more favorable to global financial lending institutions such as the 
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Robinson sees the Middle 
East as one of the few viable areas of the world yet to be drawn into the US's 
sphere of economic influence, and concludes that, more than a way to exploit 
oil, the US-led invasion and occupation serve as potential doorways into 
broader, more advantageous economic engagement in the region.

NDI and IRI are two out of four core organizations of the National Endowment 
for Democracy (NED), a self-described "nonprofit, non-governmental, 
bipartisan, grant-making organization" the stated purpose of which is "to 
help strengthen democratic institutions around the world." Created during 
Ronald Reagan's first term as president to enhance overseas political 
influence weakened by Jimmy Carter's 1977 ban on CIA democracy front groups, 
NED's reputation as a promoter of democracy never truly thrived outside the 
United States.

The organization and its affiliates regularly encounter allegations that 
they have supported opposition candidates and promoted subversive movements 
in countries where governments -- some democratically elected -- are seen as 
threatening to US interests.

According to Campbell of NDI, both his group and its Republican counterpart 
originally became involved with political party formation and civil society 
efforts in Iraq shortly after the Spring 2003 invasion, using NED funds 
while getting their feet wet. By the next winter, administrators at the 
US-run Coalition Provisional Authority, along with others at the State 
Department and the National Security Council, began showing interest, 
Campbell explained. Then, in early 2004, the US government allocated $25 
million to the NED to spread among its affiliate groups. Finally, in 
preparation for the 2005 vote, USAID gave more than $80 million to NDI, IRI 
and others involved in the consortium set up to provide technical and 
political assistance to the electoral process.

In Robinson's view, ulterior motives of US groups aside, the idea that 
Western advisors can help democratize a society like Iraq also appears 
shortsighted. In reference to NDI's stated practice of providing advice to 
politically vulnerable groups, Robinson said: "It's not at all clear that 
Iraqi women need the advice of people from the US telling them how to 
organize -- or that students do, or so forth. And it's not clear what value 
that advice could possibly have, other than trying to create a political 
bloc inside the country which will conform to the larger US vision for 
Iraq."

Robinson also says that US-based organizations, serving as private proxies 
for the government, will back numerous political parties in Iraq, just as 
IRI and NDI say they do; but Robinson says there will be stricter limits on 
that assistance than such organizations would lead the public to believe. 
"It wouldn't be that the US would put its eggs behind one party, but 
[rather] a number of parties within a political spectrum -- representing 
different constituencies, but all within boundaries.

"What remains outside of those boundaries," Robinson continued, "is an 
alternative vision for Iraq -- a completely different vision which might 
well be the vision a majority of Iraqis would have."

Right wing critics have also questioned the record of National Endowment for 
Democracy and its affiliate organizations. In an analysis written for the 
conservative libertarian CATO Institute, Barbara Conry wrote that the NED's 
"mischief overseas" has amounted to US taxpayers funding "special-interest 
groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, 
interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic 
movements."

Last year, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) took aim at the Endowment --  
particularly the roles of NDI and IRI -- writing that the purposes for which 
both organizations are utilized elsewhere in the world "would be rightly 
illegal in the United States."

The apparently impromptu public protest in the Ukraine following the 
now-rescinded win by Russia's favored candidate, Victor Yanukovich, is 
believed to have been at least partly orchestrated by the National Endowment 
for Democracy. According to reports in The Guardian, both NDI and IRI were 
involved in developing extremely active popular campaigns in support of 
Victor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate favored in the West whose defeat 
was immediately followed by condemnations of vote fraud in the US, by both 
the State Department and the mass media.

Further, the Associated Press reported on December 10 that the Bush 
Administration spent $65 million over the past two years to support 
opposition candidates in Ukraine.

Other recent examples of NED-affiliated groups meddling in the affairs of 
sovereign nations include political upheavals in both Venezuela and Haiti.

An article in the current edition of Mother Jones specifically ties IRI to 
the 2002 armed coup that briefly removed populist President Hugo Chavez from 
power in Venezuela. According to Mother Jones, IRI was also involved in 
sponsoring parties that led to last January's violent uprising against 
democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which 
itself culminated in Aristide's exile and the dissolution of his government 
on February 29. Haiti is currently ruled by the county's chief Supreme Court 
Justice, who replaced Aristide. Haiti currently has no functioning 
parliament and new elections have yet to be held.

One of the mechanisms US-backed groups typically use to challenge 
unfavorable election results is exit polls and other tracking methods, which 
almost invariably show Washington's preferred candidates to have edged out 
their opponents. It is unclear whether IRI will engage in any exit polling 
or other verification methods on January 30, but Campbell said NDI will not, 
citing "security and logistical" concerns that would render such activity 
impossible.

There remains more to learn and report about the activities of these and 
other US-based non-governmental organizations in Iraq and the relations 
between the US State Department and various Iraqi political actors. The 
NewStandard has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents 
pertaining to the involvement of US-based organizations in Iraq's upcoming 
elections.

Regardless of how the January 30, 2005 elections turn out, US-backed 
nongovernmental organizations are likely to be involved in Iraq well into 
the future. "We're digging in for the long haul," said Campbell. "I would 
fully anticipate NDI being in Iraq five years from now or ten years from 
now."