The Bush Definition of Democracy

When Vladimir Putin used illegal tactics to engineer the election of his hand-picked subordinate Ahmad Kadyrov as president of Chechnya last October, Western pundits were quick to condemn the election as a farce. Yet the same media talking heads have expressed little outrage at the series of equally farcical "elections" organized by the Bush administration in the name of exporting democracy, be it to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani recently expressed his unhappiness at the plans of the main U.S.-affiliated political parties to negotiate a "consensus slate" of candidates for the upcoming U.N. Security Council-mandated elections in Iraq.

In some countries, with a well-established parliamentary system and a history of active political parties and an inclusive public discourse, alliances between political parties are not necessarily a problem. In India, for example, such electoral alliances may be necessary to get smaller parties some degree of parliamentary representation. In Iraq, however, the effect may be extremely damaging.

According to a recent New York Times editorial, such a "consensus" slate could create "essentially a one-party election unless Iraq's fragmented independents manage to organize themselves into an effective new political force." Without adequate safeguards, wrote the Times, in an uncharacteristically direct manner, "Iraq's first free election may look uncomfortably like the plebiscites choreographed to produce 98 percent majorities for Saddam Hussein."

While the Times neglected to mention this fact, the Bush administration has established a track record of managing elections to produce such lopsided results for its favored candidates first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

During the June 2002 Afghan loya jirga, roughly 1500 delegates assembled to pick the interim president of the country. Although all delegates were under a great degree of pressure from U.S.-backed warlords (who did everything from killing delegates before the assembly to controlling the floor at the assembly), over 800 signed a statement in support of Zahir Shah, the exiled monarch. Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi, delegates to the loya jirga, told the New York Times that the United States then stepped in and "the entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former king was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the government." When the assembly resumed, delegates were given a choice between Hamid Karzai and two unknown candidates thrown into the field purely for symbolic value (For example, one of them was a woman).

More recently, the Bush administration has been busy altering the timetable of Afghanistan's elections to meet its own needs. It has pressured the Afghan Electoral Commission to delay the parliamentary elections until next April but push through the presidential elections in October. The plan is clearly to ensure that there will be no time for anyone to emerge as a national-level alternative to Hamid Karzai as the president.

Of the current 18 candidates, only Yunus Qanooni enjoys significant name recognition and no one considers him to pose a credible challenge to Karzai. Even so, U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad (who is closely linked with neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) has using coercion and bribery to pressure candidates – be it Qanooni or Mohammed Mohaqiq, who represents the minority Hazaras – to drop out of the race. Qanooni and 13 other candidates recently came together to devise strategies to deal with Khalilzad's bullying.

The U.S. record in Iraq is not much different. The administration has touted the local elections held under the aegis of the U.S. occupation as evidence of its democratic intentions. But the rhetoric far outstrips the reality. In many instances, the "election" consisted of the appointment of the mayor and/or city council members by the local U.S. commander, sometimes to disastrous effect. For example, the U.S. appointed a Sunni from Baghdad to be mayor of the mostly Shi'a Najaf, cancelled an election he would surely have lost, but later had to remove him from office because of charges of corruption and Ba'athist links.