Iraq: the bullet and the ballot box, part II. posted by Richard Seymour

I've written at some length about this before. New revelations have emerged, which confirm that suspicion that the US intervened to support its preferred candidates in Iraq's demonstration election:

In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President George W. Bush approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political parties, but he rescinded this because of congressional opposition, current and former government officials said.

In a response to questions about a report on the plan in the next issue of The New Yorker magazine, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, said that "in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try - and did not try - to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office."

The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington.

The New Yorker article, by Seymour Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed this, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties.

Any clandestine U.S. effort to influence the elections or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States would have run counter to the Bush administration's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.

...

Despite the denials by some Bush administration officials on Saturday, others who took part in or were briefed on the discussion said they could not rule out the possibility that the United States and its allies might have provided secret aid to augment the broad, overt support provided to Iraqi candidates and parties by the State Department, through organizations like the International Democratic Institute.

...

Officials and former officials familiar with the debate inside the White House last year said that after considerable debate, the president's national security team recommended that he sign a secret, formal authorization for covert action to influence the election, called a "finding." They said that Bush either had already signed it or was about to when objections were raised in Congress. Ultimately, he rescinded the decision, the officials said.

...

Time magazine first reported in October 2004 that the administration had encountered congressional opposition over a plan to provide covert support to Iraqi candidates. The New Yorker account detailed more elements of that debate.

The current and former officials interviewed Saturday amplified how Bush had initially approved the covert plan, and how the White House met objections as it notified congressional leaders, as required under the law.

This is war, and this is what is to be expected. Aside from the various things I mention in the linked posts up top, it is worth adding that perhaps the most obvious propaganda war - the Balkans War in the Spring-Summer of 1999, which can be seen as a template for future media wars - involved not only the use of PR agencies, but also the setting up of an International Public Information Group (IPI), whose role was to spin and distort news stories, squelch and suppress uncomplimentary stories about the US, and particularly bludgeon those that may reach an American public.

Similarly, when neoconservative ideologues speak of needing to rebuild an embattled US hegemony and legitimacy, they aren't impotently expatiating. It is a serious problem for the US: however cold, empty and windy the latest avatar of the Founding Fathers is, they are not merely whistling through the breeze and beating their gums together.