Time: A Challenge to Maliki in Iraq (Allawi on his way back?)
It's make-or-break time in Iraq. A massive, U.S.-led security operation is under way in Baghdad, but the results have been decidedly mixed. Elsewhere, Sunni terrorists continue to strike with impunity at Shi'a targets — and there's growing fear of a backlash. A critical summit of world powers and Iraq's neighbors is about to take start in Baghdad, setting the stage for prickly verbal exchanges between the U.S. and Iran. In Washington, the Pentagon is looking to send even more American troops to Iraq, despite mounting bipartisan opposition.
Under the circumstances, the last thing Iraq needs now is political instability. Enter Iyad Allawi.
The former prime minister has recently returned to Baghdad after an absence of many months, and he's wasted no time in trying to undermine the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Iraqi political analysts say Allawi is trying to cobble together a caucus of disparate groups — Kurds, Sunnis, former Baathists and secular parties — to pry power away from the Shi'a coalition that dominates the Iraqi parliament. He may already have scored one coup: Fadila, one of the junior partners of the coalition, has announced it is breaking away. It is widely assumed the party, which has its power base in and around the southern city of Basra, will join Allawi's bloc. That's not enough to bring Maliki down, but analysts say Allawi is hoping to drive a wedge between the Shi'a coalition's main groups: Moqtada al-Sadr's faction, Maliki's Dawa Party and the Iran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). (Allawi turned down TIME's requests for an interview.)
But these shenanigans are ultimately doomed: there can be no stable government in Baghdad without the full backing of the main Shi'a parties, which have twice demonstrated their popularity in general elections. (On both occasions, Allawi's own party got less than 15% of the vote.) And the caucus he is trying to build is highly unstable: it is hard to see the Fadila leadership, which loathes everything Saddam Hussein stood for, coexisting with the unrepentant Baathists who make up the Sunni caucus in parliament.
Although Allawi is himself Shi'a, his politics are secular, which is a red flag for the Islamists who dominate the Shi'a coalition. His other great handicap: both Shi'a and Sunni extremists believe he has Iraqi blood on his hands. Shi'a groups loyal to the anti-American cleric al-Sadr (who commands the second-largest block within the parliamentary coalition) have never forgiven Allawi for authorizing the 2004 American crackdown on the Mahdi Army. Sunni hardliners, meanwhile, remember him as the man who signed off on the massive U.S. offensive against Fallujah. Both sides deride him as an American puppet, pointing to his CIA connections during the 1990s, when he was in exile.
more:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x267458Political bloc to target Shiite extremists By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — A new coalition in Iraq's parliament seeks to challenge Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and force him to purge Shiite militias from police and government.
The alliance is led by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who was Iraq's interim prime minister in 2004-05. The bloc is a minority in parliament but aspires to overrule al-Maliki on several key issues, Allawi said in an interview with USA TODAY.
The two largest Sunni groups in Iraq's parliament joined Allawi's coalition this week. A leading Kurdish politician and some moderate Shiites also have shown interest.
"We cannot see national reconciliation and national unity … thriving in a state of chaos and institutions riddled with militias," Allawi said Tuesday. "We feel our country has really been taken apart."
more:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x267328
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