PR & the Iraqi election. posted by Richard Seymour

The lies we are hearing about Iraq are not accidental or incidental, but part of a carefully choreographed PR campaign. I'm hungover and grumpy, so I'll cut to the chase and list them ordinally before revealing the men behind the curtain.

1) Turnout was higher than expected. According to polls touted by occupation sources before the election, 80% of Iraqis were expected to turnout. Iraq's President stated in public that he expected the majority of eligible voters to turn out at the polls. The lowest estimate was 50-60% , which is now the highest reputable estimate of actual turnout. The much drooled over 72% figure offered by a lone election official before the voting was even complete has largely been abandoned. It is still being said that about 8 million Iraqis voted, which would be around 57% of registered (rather than elibible) voters. There is little to base this figure on other than a wink from the Electoral Commission about whom we know - about whom we are allowed to know - so little. The turnout in the Sunni heartland was negligible, of course - so much so that the Christian Science Monitor felt compelled to lard praise on the Fallujah turnout ( 8,000 of 300,000 residents voted). Further, as Iraqi blogger Raed points out, the total number of Iraqi eligible voters inside and outside the country is more than 16.75 million, and the number of people that actually voted is less than 8.25 million.

Less than 50% of all eligible voters actually voted.

Turnout expectations ranged from 50-80% before the election. They now range from below 50% to 57%. Not a miraculous turnout, then.

2) The vote legitimises the occupation. Most Iraqis want the troops out . Most Iraqis voted for parties demanding, at the very least, a timetable for withdrawal. Most Iraqis voted overwhelmingly for programmes totally opposed to the Bremer-imposed 'free market' chaos. Naomi Klein summarises :

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.

3) Iraqis were overjoyed with the elections. Some presumably were, but the imagery we associate with this election was tightly controlled by the occupiers. As Julian Manyon of ITN told CNN International:

[There is a] wide range of factors which are actually preventing journalists from covering this election properly, and one of those factors, for example, is the way in which the American handlers who are actually running the Ministry of Information's affairs here in real terms, have designed the whole thing. I would say that along with the violence, it is just as serious an impediment for journalists.

Why, for example, we've been limited to filming at only five polling stations, and we discovered when the list of the five polling stations was published 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.

The suspicion, entirely justified, is that the coalition carefully selected voting stations where they knew the turnout would be high, and where they expected that loyalty to Sistani would produce scenes of happy voters eager to raise the purple finger®. Jonathan Steele reported in yesterday's Guardian:

"I tore up my ballot paper," said a young woman who works for a US government-funded NGO in Basra. "But I wanted my finger inked, in case the religious parties check on people in the street."

Others abstained for different reasons. "Many of my friends will not be voting," Sayed Mudhaffer, a Basra official of the Writers' Union, told me. "Some don't know which list to vote for, because there hasn't been enough campaigning on what they stand for. Some think that because the United Nations isn't supervising, it won't be fair or honest."

His last point is well taken. As the old saying has it, what matters is not who votes, but who counts. Because of security fears there were even fewer international monitors in Iraq than in Afghanistan last year, and most stayed only a few minutes in the polling places they visited. They saw very little.

Why is it taking as much as two weeks to come up with a result in Iraq? In the polling station, where I watched the count, when the doors closed last week, they tabulated all 1,500 votes in just over three hours. Everything seemed above board and the results were given out "on background". But they had to be sent to Baghdad for "checking" before a public declaration.

Undoubtedly, many Iraqis were happy to be voting - but not for the reasons Washington might assume. Steele continues: "Most gave mundane reasons for their vote: patriotism, a sense of duty, concern over joblessness and power cuts, and the hope that the election might be a first step towards change. There was also a strong underlying feeling that having an elected government could hasten the restoration of sovereignty and an end to the occupation.

The stage-managing of the electoral process has produced imagery and associations that have little to do with how Iraqis actually felt about the elections, and which do not capture the fact that there were conflicting views on their legitimacy.

4) Iraq's elections were 'free and fair'. We already know about the allegations of ballot fixing , the 'irregularities' and the exclusion of thousands of voters .

However, we ought to have known before the voting even began that something was up. Juan Cole reported that the 'pockets' that Allawi said might not be able to vote contained about 3 million people . And follow the money: USAID allocated $30 million to a CIA front organisation, the National Endowment for Democracy (which was involved in assisting putschists in Venezuela), to allocate to parties regarded as 'moderate'. Ex-patriot parties had already developed a monumental material advantage by working with the occupiers, from whom they received $100 million before the invasions. Dahr Jamail reported that Iyad Allawi had so much he was giving it away - to journalists . The US taxpayer was tapped for $80 million (on top of everything else) to pay for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) to use in manipulating the Iraqi elections. From MediaLens :

Professor William I. Robinson of the Global and International Studies Programme at the University of California calls NDI and IRI "extensions" of the US State Department:

"I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are trying to select individual leaders and organisations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational project for Iraq."

Foreign observers were first of all to be banned , but the tiny number that eventually made it could only descend on the polling booth for a nano-second before buzzing off. And this in a country in which fighting persists daily, the occupying troops carry out war crimes , the trainee Iraqi police forces torture prisoners and hundreds of thousands live in refugee camps In fact, there was so much wrong with the process that Julian Manyon remarked:

I mean, we've got a situation in Mosul, for example, where American troops, we now discover because the Iraqi employees of the election organization have deserted en masse, it's American soldiers who will be transporting the ballot boxes around when they are full of votes. This is really very far from ideal, and if it were happening in any other country -- I mean, one could mention Ukraine, for example -- there would be a wild chorus of international protest.

Jonathan Steele remarks that "TV images usually simplify, if not falsify, the story", having cited the images from Vietnam and El Salvador which did exactly that. Precisely the point, in fact. What we were treated to was a crude production, a PR exercise that fed a steady stream of disinformation, partial information and outright falsehood to domestic populations. The 'branding' involved was particularly stark. The 'purple finger' has all the hallmarks of a PR consultant gimmick, (just like, in fact, the 'Orange revolution' theme in Ukraine). It is such a gimmick that a new company has been founded in America to sell t-shirts and baseball caps on the theme:

A new company called FreedomInPurple.com launched a website that the founder, Israel Amadores, says "is a reminder of the success of the Iraqi elections and the further validation of the ongoing march of democracy." The company initially is selling tshirts, mugs. and, caps but plans to expand into other venues with the main design logo being a hand with outstretched index finger stained purple. It hasn't been without controvery however. Asked about the design that says "give a liberal the finger," Amadores says that "it is just a playful way of saying that the power of democracy should never be underestimated and is the rightful domain of all people.

Some on the left in this country have a negative or pessimistic view regarding the power of democracy, the tshirt just reminds them of the power of democracy in a lighthearted way."

Giving the purple finger is also said to be sexy . Hill & Knowlton ran the propaganda campaign for the US government in the first Gulf War. This time round, they set up the Iraq Public Diplomacy Group composed of elements of the CIA, the National Security Agency and others to target 'opinion leaders' with propaganda. The Whitehouse and Number Ten have embarked on a number of PR campaigns before, during and after the war. (Even Allawi got in on the act : he "hired the law firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds and the New York public relations firm of Brown Lloyd James" to push his bid to run Iraq). Guess who organised the Iraqi election campaign? Be upstanding "Tony Marsh and Lance Copsey, principals of the Republican media consulting firm Marsh Copsey & Scott" who now work for the International Republican Institute (IRI) :

Marsh Copsey & Scott recently signed a major contract with the International Republican Institute to develop an election media center. The media center will be a critical component to help Baghdad’s candidates and political parties in Iraq’s first ever free and fair election.

Marsh Copsey & Scott will design and construct the media center, install the equipment and provide guidance and training as needed to the Iraqi nationals who will use it.

And who are the IRI? Well, they claim to support the fostering of democracy, but they seem to whiff of scorched corpses from Haiti , Cuba and Cambodia . They were also involved in the CIA's attempt to hi-jack dissent in Ukraine . (For more on that, see here ).

The skillful production of emotionally potent over-simplifications thus has its sources in PR, and one expects that the Bush team makes direct use of one of the major international PR firms. The lies listed above may seem obvious or cack-handed, but remember that they don't have to stick. They are merely intended to dazzle, bewilder and divert, and thereby lower one's resistance to the carefully constructed narrative that much of the media is all too willing to convey. Just bear it in mind, that's all.