Rocking the Vote

Foreign service officer Tobin J. Bradley helped Iraqis choose ballots over bullets.

Last January, despite dire predictions of violence, millions of Iraqis defied conventional wisdom and turned out to vote in the first free national election in 50 years. Triumphal Iraqis of every creed showed off fingers stained with indelible purple ink, a hedge against voter fraud that became a potent symbol of hope across a troubled region.

The historic balloting was not a foregone conclusion in post-invasion Iraq. While world leaders in late 2003 were debating the feasibility of direct national elections, Tobin J. Bradley, a 29-year-old Foreign Service officer living in a tent in the Dhi Qar province in southern Iraq, was busy organizing voting in cities across the south. Bradley organized 15 direct local elections, including one that brought the first woman to public office in the south. His work demonstrated that the national ration-card system could serve as a method to validate eligible voters and that conservative Iraqis could be convinced to allow women to vote.

An Arabic speaker whose language skills were honed during a two-year assignment in Jordan, Bradley volunteered for service in Iraq in the summer of 2003, leaving what a colleague called a "plush" assignment in Brussels. He arrived in Iraq in September and quickly found himself in Dhi Qar province working as the U.S. liaison for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

It was a daunting assignment: "We had hundreds of people coming to our door. They needed jobs, water, electricity. There were property disputes, labor disputes. . . . What I was really doing was facilitating the Iraqi dialogue that wasn't able to occur under Saddam," Bradley says. With his indispensable language skills, the son of the Cathedral City, Calif., city manager was able to draw on years of dinner-table tutorials about managing city operations and balancing conflicting interests.

Bradley traveled throughout the pro-vince meeting with local interest groups and organizing elections. The work was difficult, all-consuming and immensely gratifying, he says. At times, it was extraordinarily dangerous. In one harrowing situation, the CPA compound in Nasariyah was under siege by militia loyal to Moqtada al Sadr. When military intervention seemed imminent, Bradley, fervently working the phones with his local contacts, negotiated a settlement of sorts, likely sparing the city substantial violence.

"At that moment, I was afraid if I didn't do the right thing a lot of people would die," he says. Bradley remains hopeful about Iraq: "I've seen democracy work there."