The midwives of democracy toil behind the towering gray blast walls that encase every Western enterprise in the new Iraq. This one, in an anonymous cluster of buildings, houses the country's first school for political candidates.
There is a miniature television studio, where novice office-seekers learn the fine art of the sound bite and the value of "earned media." There are conference rooms, where instructors from countries that have already left war behind conduct seminars on "Six Steps to Planning and Winning a Campaign." (Step 3: Targeting the Voters).
A graphic artist stands by with advice on getting a party's poster noticed on the cluttered streets of Baghdad. A former congressional staffer stands by to emphasize the vital difference between an army of volunteers and an armed militia.
And on the rooftops of nearby buildings, snipers simply stand by, their vigil as discreet as the low-profile democracy-building effort underway below.
Funded by U.S. taxpayers, the Baghdad office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs stands at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world. In the 13 months it has operated in the country, the institute has tutored political aspirants from all of Iraq's major parties, trained about 10,000 domestic election observers and nurtured thousands of ordinary citizens seeking to build the institutions that form the backbone of free societies.
In Iraq, a not-so-routine mission
The work is in many ways entirely routine for the institute -- as it is for the two other Washington-based organizations that are here advising on the architecture of democracy: the International Republican Institute (IRI), which declined requests for an interview, and the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), which along with the United Nations is providing crucial technical assistance to Iraq's electoral commission. The groups work in scores of countries, from those in Eastern Europe to Yemen and Indonesia, and arrived in Baghdad with solid reputations for encouraging democratic norms. Together, the three have been allotted as much as $90 million for their work in Iraq.
But such is the state of Iraq less than a week before elections for the National Assembly that the Democratic Institute's instructors dare not see their names in print. "You can say, 'an official with an international organization that operates in Iraq,' " said the institute's country director, a former political operative and public relations executive who, like his boss, happens to be Canadian. He later agreed to allow the use of the organization's name.
The overriding concern is security. In Iraq, schools are being bombed simply because they might be pressed into service as polling stations Sunday. No sane group intimately involved in mounting the vote dares wave from atop its blast walls.
Discretion is key
But there are other good reasons for a certain discretion in Iraq.
"If you walk into a coffee shop and say, 'Hi, I'm from an American organization and I'm here to help you,' that's not going to help," said one instructor, who was born in Iraq and is well versed in the region's widely held perception of U.S. hegemony. "If you say you're here to encourage democracy, they say you're here to control the Middle East."
Almost two years after the invasion that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, public opinion polls -- including several commissioned by IRI -- indicate that growing majorities view the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq as a force of occupation, not liberation. The longer the American soldiers stay, the more Iraqis say they want them to leave.
Staff members at the Democratic Institute said they understood the skepticism -- and how to overcome it. It helps that Americans account for only one-third of the institute trainers. Instructors from Brazil, France, Ecuador, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq and other countries make up the majority of foreign staff, and the local staff of 60-plus Iraqis is three times as large.
"We don't look like the face of American foreign policy," said one instructor.
Moreover, the well-funded American democracy programs are the only game in town.
"There's no lack of people wanting to offer their assistance," said the country director. "Everybody wants to play here." So far, however, almost everyone has weighed the risks and stayed away. The daily car bombs, assassinations, kidnappings and other attacks have kept most of the global altruists over the border in Jordan.
There is one exception. Over the weekend, a lone international election observer ventured into Baghdad and took up residence in the Green Zone, the fortress at the heart of the capital. Others remained in Amman, as clean and secure as Baghdad is dirty and violent.
"If you go to Amman these days, you can meet everybody," the country director said.
But if Iraq's nascent democrats find themselves with no options but the Americans for training in politics, civil society, women's empowerment and governance, they apparently harbor few complaints.
"They're very good," said Jassim Hilfi, a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party who said he had read every word of the institute's Political Campaign Planning Manual and every other publication handed out. "They benefited us a great deal."
The Communist Party, which predates the Baath Party that persecuted its members for decades, has mounted a vibrant campaign that political observers in Iraq say may outperform expectations in Sunday's balloting.
"They were quite fair," Hilfi said. "We did not feel there was any segregation or playing favorites. Frankly, I'm very grateful. This was the only support we got from outside the country."
Other groups said they got less out of the training.
"In terms of know-how, there was little there for us," said Saad Jawad Qindeel, political director of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The party, also known as SCIRI, was founded more than two decades ago as an opposition exile group in Iran. It heads the so-called unified Shiite Muslim slate that entered the campaign as the presumptive favorite, not least for being organized by the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior cleric revered by most of Iraq's Shiite majority.
Qindeel said SCIRI officials joined U.S.-funded delegations to scout elections in Indonesia and Lithuania. The party also found some of the IRI's polling helpful in fashioning its message. And it redeemed the voucher that the Democratic Institute offered to all candidates, good for 70,000 posters at Baghdad print shops. But for SCIRI, it amounted to token help.
"We print in batches of 100,000, usually," Qindeel said. "At the end of the day, it's the new parties that will benefit."
About 400 parties made themselves known to the Democratic Institute, which focused on organization while IRI, in a division of labor, focused on message. All got the benefit of the same primer on organization, led by the garrulous Capitol Hill veteran who heads the institute's party development arm.
"Political parties seem to think Americans know something about parties and organization," she said. "They do see us sometimes as interlocutors. 'Hey, tell George Bush such and such.' I say, 'You know, George Bush doesn't take my calls. I voted for the other guy.' "
Basic instruction
Every group got the basic instruction on practical application of electoral fundamentals and the principles behind them, universal notions of consensus and consultation that are as deeply rooted in Iraqi culture as anywhere else. But some habits had to be unlearned. In a country emerging from decades of one-party rule, instructors made an early effort to coax Iraqis away from the tea-room politicking that seeks succor in fellow elites and to get people to understand that the way to reach voters is by knocking on doors.
"And parties are doing it," the instructor said. "In political terms, door-to-door campaigning is like crack cocaine. You do it once, you're not going to want to do anything else."
Those, like the Communists, who tried it early came away with new ideas, culled from the people they sought to represent. "Suddenly you're not enslavers of the people, you're servants of the people," she said.
Other subjects called for more delicacy. Several Iraqi parties that began as opposition groups -- including SCIRI and the two mainstream Kurdish parties -- come to the election with substantial militias. Once necessary for protection against Hussein's forces, most of these irregulars were nominally subsumed in the new Iraqi security forces. Still, by many accounts, they continue to cast a shadow over the emerging political landscape.
"We try to explain the downside," said the political party instructor. "For all of your 'activists,' you are responsible for their behavior. If they are bureaucrats and they are abusing that power, you will pay the price at the ballot box. If they are police or national guards or just guys running around with guns, you will pay for their behavior."
At the same time, for all the fears that the elections will be defined by violence, the democracy instructors speak ardently of the keen appetite for the vote expressed by ordinary Iraqis. About 80 percent of Iraqis say they intend to turn out Sunday, a polling figure the instructors call credible given the quiet determination they have seen among rank and file citizens.
Substantial evidence of that resolve accumulated in recent months, as thousands of Iraqis defied continued threats to do the mundane work of the elections, training as monitors and election officials.
But the instructors said an episode last October first brought the matter into high relief. The institute had scheduled a workshop on coalition-building at the Palestine Hotel. About 180 Iraqis sent word they would attend.
Moments before the appointed hour, a vehicle bomb exploded in the street outside. U.S. troops cordoned off the hotel as there were reports that a second suicide bomber was cruising the area. The workshop organizers were talking about rescheduling when their cell phones started ringing.
"People were calling to apologize about being late," the country director said. "The troops were blocking the hotel, but they were waiting outside in the smoke and the wreckage and the body parts."
In the end, after the cordon was lifted, about 165 people showed up. "At that point," he said, "I kind of figured there's something going on here."
Wright reported from Washington.