From The New York Post
by HEATHER ROBINSON
In a phone interview from Baghdad yester day, an Iraqi member of parliament said he believes he and other liberals are being shortchanged votes by an Iraqi Electoral Commission that has been corrupted by Iran.
“The citizens of Iraq went to vote in the election; they have done their job,” said Mithal al-Alusi of the Iraqi Nation Party. “But bad games have been played in the election.”
Alusi’s secular party champions human (including women’s) rights as well as free markets, a free press and alliance among democracies. He first won election in December 2005 after his two sons were murdered by terrorists.
The killings were seen as “payback” for Alusi’s decision to visit Israel — but Alusi, a Sunni Muslim, refused to be intimidated. He stayed in Iraq, got his then-little-known party onto the ballot, won his seat — and continued to visit Israel.
Now he warns of massive tampering in the tallying of the March 7 votes.
For evidence, he points to discrepancies between the Iraqi Electoral Commission’s report of the vote count and the results cited by independent election monitors.
Release of the final results has already been delayed, with an announcement now expected today. But initial numbers for select districts are out — and the Electoral Commission’s vote counts for Alusi’s party and other liberals don’t match the independent monitors’ numbers, he says.
“I’ll give you one example,” he told me. “We have a lady [running as part of our list], Jamila Feily. We collect paper from the monitoring people. We know how many did vote for us. [Jamila Feily] did receive 5,000-something votes. [But] the election commission declared she received 57 votes.
“This lady, she has 600 people working [as volunteers] for her, friends and supporters. How then she could get 57 votes?”
The overall pattern, he claims, is a massive “vanishing” of votes: “They just take the zeros out.”
He says these discrepancies show up not only in votes for his party, but also for other progressives, such as the Shiite liberal Iyad Jamal Al-Din — who also campaigned against Iranian meddling in Iraq.
How could such fraud occur under the supervision of independent monitors? Many, if not most, of the monitors “can’t read Arabic,” Alusi explained.
His strongest evidence may be that the emerging “official” vote count for his party is far below what he drew a year ago, when he was virtually a national pariah.
The Iraqi Electoral Commission says Alusi’s party got 10,000 votes in Baghdad this time around. But in January 2009’s provincial elections, he got 60,000 votes in the city. And back then, he was facing prosecution for treason because he had visited Israel. (Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court has since struck down the charges, ruling that it was no longer a crime for Iraqis to travel, including to Israel.)
“[At that time] they were preaching in the mosque, ‘Mithal is Mossad’ and we received 60,000 votes in Baghdad.”
Alusi also fears the Obama administration will remain passive in the face of possibly rampant fraud, even if Iran and its pawns are the likely culprits. The White House might see maintaining a facade of stability in Iraq as important enough to let Iran to hijack the Iraqi election.
“I hope I am wrong,” he said. If not, then “the American government is making a huge mistake. They will be pushing Iraq, and Israel, into a death corner.
“You can sell this [to the American people and the world] for one week, one month, six months, but the fascists in Iran will be getting stronger all the time.
“Then what?”
2 Comments
Very interesting developments. Iran’s influence is troubling.
Americans cannot expect that Iraq will elect a George Washington type democracy.
We can hope for the best.
However, Iraq could simply vote in leaders who will dismantle the democratic machinery in place which got them elected.
Perhaps they will vote in a religious theocracy. Who knows.
Countries which are able to make peaceful transitions of power are the exception and not the rule.
Thank you for continuing to cover Mithal, Heather — he’s been the rational gadfly (though with an intensely personal stake) to the political equation in Iraq for some time now.
The contemporary state of Iranian influence amongst the Shiite population of Iraq was one of the biggest analytic misjudgments of US planning prior to the 2003 war. Nationalist and Arab-ethnic sentiments of the Iraqi people, prominent during the Iran-Iraq War and strong still at the time of the 90/91 Gulf War, were somewhat eroded over the course of the subsequent ten years, as the faultering Saddam, in desperation, tried to reinvent himself from a nationalist, pan-Arab leader to a leader of the Islamic world. Some of the restraints on the Shiite religious network were lifted, thus allowing a local grid for Iranian Shiite proselytization (cum “Islamic Revolution”/Iranian nationalism) to quickly plug into in 2003, as the Saddam regime collapsed.
Sad as war is, once a nation has taken that step, the logic of statecraft dictates that the victorious nation must impose such conditions upon a defeated territory that it becomes less an existential threat to the victorious nation than when it initiated military actions. In this case, in keeping with US political and foreign policy ideals, the means for doing so would have been monitoring the establishment of a democratic state with a constitution which protected individual and minority rights, promoted internal development and allowed for the building of a civilian and military infrastructure which defended such principles (if for no other logical reason than we wouldn’t want to have to go to war again in five years against the state we just helped establish). This is very frustrating and immensely serious. A see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil US policy in regard to Iraqi political independence is naive and irresponsible (granted, the sensitivities involved in letting the Iraqis establish their own political infrastructure at this point). I hope we remain at least in a position of “political overwatch” to maintain the integrity of these principles, and don’t cut and run for the sake of domestic political expediency.
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