Allawi deatl a big blow

BY PV VIVEKANAND

THE future of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and through him the American plans in have been dealt a severe blow by the wide margin that the Shiite list endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani has gained in the Jan.30 elections.
Indeed, there is an off-chance that Allawi could still emerge as a compromise candidate and seek to hang onto the job as prime-ministership based on the votes that the country's northern Kurdish groups gained in the elections. However, the Shiite list is unlikely to accept Allawi as prime minister. One of it leaders, Ibrahim Al Jafaari, has already staked a claim to that job.
On its own, the group led by Allawi and President Ghazi Al Yawar is seen as securing around 15 per cent of the votes cast, but they could team up with the Kurds, who are expected to gain around 20 per cent of the votes. Thus the strength of the Allawi-Kurd alliance would be around 35 per cent of the total votes cast for the 275-member assembly. That is enough to give Allawi the bargaining power to prevent the United Iraqi Alliance of the Sistani camp from going ahead on its own and form a government since it would denied the required two-thirds majority in the assembly.
The Allawi-Yawar group also benefited from the support of Ayatollah Hussein Sadr of Baghdad, who does not agree with the way Sistani leads the Shiite community.
How Yawar, head of a powerful Sunni-Shiite tribe, would fit into the scheme of things is unclear yet.
In the final count, the United Iraqi Alliance list of 228 candidates representing 16 political groups headed by Abdul Aziz Al Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Jafaari’s Al Daawa is expected to gain up to 140 to150 seats on its own and thus emerge as the largest party but it would have to depend on potential coalition partners to form a two-third majority government.
The main Shite list contender against Jaafari to the post of prime minister is said to be Adel Abdel Mahdi, who is now finance minister.
Aziz Hakim, the cleric who headed the list, has indicated he is not interested in prime ministership.
The Kurds — represented by the United Kurdish list set up jointly by Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani — could turn out to be the kingmakers here. They account for about two million of the eight million votes cast, and this is seen to give them around 60 seats, or around 20 to 22 per cent of the votes compared with their 16 to 18 per cent content in the Iraqi population (the Kurds are accused artificially inflating their support in Kirkuk by importing tens of thousands of armed voters from across Kurdistan. Turkey, alarmed by the growing strength of the Kurds, has demanded an American explanation and has hinted at the use of Turkish military force to rectify the distortion). The Kurds also garnered some 400,000 overseas voters in the United States and Europe.
Again, the Kurds on their own could not prevent the formation of a Sistani camp government. They have to team up with the Allawi group, but the two are natural allies, given that both of them enjoy American backing and have been in the forfront of implementing American-designed programmes in the country since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
In yet another slap to the US, Jaafari, who is emerging as the favourite to become the next prime minister of Iraq, wants to bring in Moqtada Sadr, a firebrand cleric who has challenged the US dominance of the country, into his cabinet.
In a series of interviews over the weekend, Jafaari described Sadr as a responsible person who is capable of contributing to the reconstruction of Iraq.
Jafaari noted that Moqtadr Sadr's father was killed by Saddam Hussein, and the young cleric has a large number of followers.
At one point Sadr was among America's top enemies in Iraq, with the US military declaring him wanted dead or alive.
Sadr called on Friday for the US to set a deadline to leave Iraq, something Washington is not prepared to do. Sadr is also known to have ties with figures in Iran, an archfoe of the US.
Allawi is trying to jockey himself into a position as a consensus candidate for premiership. However, unless his group and the rest of other parties, including the powerful Kurds, come up with an absolute one-third of the votes, the United Iraqi List will have an open ground and a free hand — with two-thirds of the vote — to form a government on its own without any challenge.
That would be clear in about a week's time.