1 mar 2004 año - IRAQ: Bell Pottinger wins pro-democracy account

Descripción:

In March 2004, Bell Pottinger-led consortium hired to promote democracy ahead of the handover of power to an interim Iraqi authority on 30 June.

Account run primarily by Mark Turnbull and Paul Bell:

"We used a team of 60 people in Baghdad. All but two were, what's the word, I want to say journeymen sort of recruits; they weren't real people. They were sort of hot people who spoke language or who had certain skill sets that we wanted and they worked for us on a contract basis. We paid them an amount of money, cleared the contract with the American general, and the general approved it and so we paid them that way... We pitched the contract- was to support the American um, war against Iraq. And particularly it was to handle the process of an election- a post, post an election, post the conflict. There was supposed to be a period when we blew up the Iraqis and killed everybody. And then we were called in to sit- move so was a society to create an action campaign and get people to participate in it. We were set a target of 70% turnout for the election, we got 90% it was very good. And I remember going- the first time I pitched for that I went to Tampa, in Florida where the procurial takes place. I made a presentation to generals and we said, "Well what we'll do is we'll run ads. Run ads and posters, ads... It was just like the Tory campaign. But it was the campaign for Iraq."

Its brief also included publicising the establishment of an independent electoral authority, and promoting the election of an Iraqi government in 2005.

In an interview with BBC’s Hardtalk, Lord Bell said his firm's brief was not to "sell" the idea of democracy, but to "inform people about the steps in the transition to democracy".

“We are trying to persuade the people of the best route to arrive at peace and prosperity, which is what everybody wants,” said Bell of the brief at the time.

The team reported to David Petraeus:

"David Petraeus was in charge of what we did and he supervised it and agreed to it. Um, and he could position it in context to things, and I think if he was back in charge of the military I'd persuade him to run a campaign again."

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