Seymour Hersh's "Get Out the Vote," subtitle: 'Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election?' Read the whole thing, which peels through several layers of various plans to try to help out Allawi and prevent Iranian-backed Shiite parties from taking the store. This is a key graph:

In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration’s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders.

Update: Reaction to the Hersh piece from the WaPo's Dafna Linzer and a previous Times' report discussed here.
Reports Linzer:

...A U.S. official who was heavily involved in preparing for the vote said U.S. officials ultimately offered a variety of less organized Iraqi parties support in the form of "cell phones, printing billboards and pamphlets and poster bills advertising the electoral choices. That is what we eventually opted for, and the truth is, the effort ended up not helping the parties that we wanted to help most."

Larry Diamond of Stanford University, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation, said he urged the White House a year before the vote to "set up a transparent election fund to help not just Allawi, but a lot of parties that weren't being helped by the Iranians."

Diamond, whose book, "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq," was recently published, said he did not know how the administration handled the issue in the end.

"But I don't think we can simply take the administration's word for it. I think we need an independent congressional investigation to find out what really happened," he said.

Diamond said that details revealed in the New Yorker article would likely cause "significant damage to us and our credibility in Iraq. I also think it will do damage to Allawi because it will further the impression of Allawi as a U.S. agent and a U.S. pawn." Allawi was not reachable to comment, and much of the new Iraqi leadership was in Iran for a state visit...

Correspondent WA notes the irony of the last line, which echoes Hersh's own.

Posted by Laura at July 18, 2005 09:55 AM