Post-Election Hangover
News: Iraqi poll numbers contain some worrying signs for the country's future.
February 3, 2005
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Things are back to what passes for normal in Baghdad. The lines at the petrol stations once again stretch kilometers, traffic is snarled, and the air is thick with tension and uncertainty.
Hiba comes early so that she can shower in my hotel room, being careful that the hotel staff don't notice. To shower in the room of man she's not married or related to is against the rules. But there is rarely hot water at her house; most of Baghdad still gets three or four hours of electricity a day, at the coldest time of the year. She worries constantly about her mother, an asthmatic who needs an electric respirator during severe attacks. Her parents can't afford gas to keep a generator running. "Sometimes we have to get her to a place where she can hook up the equipment," she says. During the elections, for fear of causing an attack, Hiba, who is 31, lied to her mother about working.
Today we set out first to the Ministry of Agriculture to find out more about concerns surrounding CPA Order 81, which forces upon Iraqi farmers U.S.-style seed patent law and prohibits them from saving seeds from one season's crop for planting the next (which is how farming has long been done in Iraq).
The minister was entirely unaware of the law, and her spokesman admitted that it would be impossible to prevent farmers from continuing to engage in the practice of saving seeds because many of them couldn't afford to buy new seeds every year anyway.
"The CPA? The CPA is gone," the spokesman said.
After the ministry, we went to meet Saadoun Al-Dulaimie, a local pollster. He was unsurprised by the turnout for the election.
"We did a survey with a sample size of 5,000 three days before the election," he said. "And those who said they would participate despite any difficulties were more than 80 percent."
The poll was not conducted in Nineveh, Salaheddin, Diyala and Anbar, Sunni Arab provinces, because of intimidation of anyone having anything to do with elections, though Dulaimie's employees were able to get numbers from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, because his tribe is based there, providing the necessary protection for the enterprise.
"Ninety percent in Ramadi said they would boycott either because they were opposed to holding the elections under occupation or because they didn't know anything about the process because candidates and workers had been intimidated in Ramadi."
He predicted a 56 percent majority of the vote for the United Iraqi Alliance, the "Shiite coalition" supposedly endorsed by Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. For Ayad Allawi's Iraq List, he's predicting between 28 and 32 percent.
He said 85 percent of those in the same survey said they would like the US troops to leave "urgently."
"The first poll we did after the invasion, in May 2003, only 30 percent of Iraqis said they saw the multinational forces as occupiers rather than liberators," he lamented. "At first, they people were expecting the American dream. It has become the American nightmare."
Dulaimie's polls are conducted for private groups and organizations such as Women for Women International, and as such, it is up to those groups to release the results, but he mentioned some pertinent findings from other surveys he had done of late in which he had been able to include the whole country.
"Only 58 percent of Iraqis said they wanted a democratic government," he said. "The rest wanted a theocracy."
Dulaimie, who took a Ph.D. in social psychology from Manchester University in the early '70s, spent 18 years outside Iraq during Saddam's reign. He is one of the shrinking class of technocrats, many with advanced degrees from European universities, who quietly opposed Saddam's excesses or simply left. After the invasion many of them offered their services to the CPA, which returned the favor by offering, at best, consulting jobs at rates of about $1,000 a month. Those who took such jobs often quit shortly after, the daily danger of meeting with occupation officials providing little incentive to deal with people who had the same degrees but little knowledge of the country, and who were being paid 10 times as much simply because they held different nationalities. One Iraqi friend of mine, who received his Ph.D. in the UK and served for a short time as a CPA consultant, complained of poor treatment at the hands of American advisors who rarely listened his advice — another reason many of the CPA orders, which generally seem to have been written by American advisors, have proven untenable.
Dulaimie himself was approached by the International Republican Institute, which conducts many of the polls used by the Bush Administration, but said his meetings with them had been a waste of time.
"They regard Iraq as a model for the region. And I told them, that's just propaganda. If you want to build Iraq, you should introduce a plan, not propaganda."
He admits many like him are once again quietly making plans to leave the country, wishing to be optimistic but seeing harbingers of darker days ahead. He chuckled bitterly at Bush's State of the Union assertion last night that Egypt "can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East."
Hosni "Mubarak just had my friend Saad Eddin Ibrahim arrested again," Dulaimie said, referring to a fellow sociologist picked up five days ago at a Cairo book fair while distributing flyers inviting people to a rally calling for direct elections in that country.
"I think they say in your country, optimism alone doesn't put food on the table," Dulaimie said. "I don't know why [the U.S.] sticks with the tribal and Islamic leaders. They will not build the new Iraq. Saddam Hussein relied on tribalism and sectarianism. … He shrunk the middle class, surrounding them, and pushed them out of the country. When the Americans came to Iraq they ignored them."
Dulaimie exhales deeply, admitting that his own predictions for the outcome of the election point toward growing rifts. "We hope the new government will continue to let us do our work, directly asking people their opinions."
David Enders is a 24-year-old freelance journalist who has spent more than a year reporting from Iraq since the end of the invasion. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation, will be released by the University of Michigan Press in April.
