Making a Mess-o'-potamia, Part II

Seymour Hersh, who is one of the few real reporters left out there, has an excellent piece in the most recent New Yorker detailing how the Bush administration interfered with the Iraqi elections to ensure a result favorable to US interests. It's not like this should surprise anyone, since there's obviously no depth to which the Busheviks wouldn't sink, but it's nice to have confirmation handy if you're arguing with a wingnut who wants to hold up the "free elections" as evidence of the rightness of the war. But be warned: this ain't exactly a feel-good article. More like a feel-nauseated-and-depressed article. An excerpt:

It is not known why the President would reject one program to intervene in the election and initiate another, more covert one. According to Pentagon consultants and former senior intelligence officials, there was a growing realization within the White House that most Sunnis would indeed boycott the election. Getting accurate polls in a country under occupation, with an active insurgency, was, of course, difficult. But the available polls showed Allawi's ratings at around three or four per cent through most of 2004, and also showed the pro-Iranian Shiite slate at more than fifty per cent. The Administration had optimistically assumed that the political and security situation would improve, despite warnings from the intelligence community that it would not.

[...]

Sometime after last November's Presidential election, I was told by past and present intelligence and military officials, the Bush Administration decided to ... covertly intervene in the Iraqi election. A former national-security official told me that he had learned of the effort from "people who worked the beat" - those involved in the operation. It was necessary, he added, "because they couldn't afford to have a disaster."

A Pentagon consultant who deals with the senior military leadership acknowledged that the American authorities in Iraq "did an operation" to try to influence the results of the election. "They had to," he said. "They were trying to make a case that Allawi was popular, and he had no juice." A government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon's civilian leaders said, "We didn?t want to take a chance."

I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that the activities were kept, in part, "off the books" - they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress. Some in the White House and at the Pentagon believed that keeping an operation off the books eliminated the need to give a formal briefing to the relevant members of Congress and congressional intelligence committees, whose jurisdiction is limited, in their view, to officially sanctioned C.I.A. operations. (The Pentagon is known to be running clandestine operations today in North Africa and Central Asia with little or no official C.I.A. involvement.)

North Africa and Central Asia, too, huh? Yeah. That's awesome. With any luck, we can start at least two more unfounded and immoral wars before the year is out!