Word: allawi
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...will al-Maliki be unhappy about the efforts of others to trim Allawi's advantage before then. The Justice and Accountability (formerly De-Baathification) Commission, which operates under the guidance of Ahmed Chalabi - the onetime Pentagon favorite now running on the Iran-backed Iraqi National Alliance (INA) slate - announced on Tuesday its intention to demand that the Supreme Court disqualify as ineligible three candidates on Allawi's list because of alleged ties to the former regime of Saddam Hussein. If the court upholds this challenge - and it has sympathetically received the commission's previous effort to expel Sunni candidates...
...Despite the secular-nationalist orientation of both al-Maliki's and Allawi's slates, the election results showed a familiar sectarian split. Most Sunnis voted for Allawi's Iraqiya list, while the Shi'ite vote was split between al-Maliki's State of Law slate and that of the INA, representing the Shi'ite Islamist parties that had put al-Maliki in power. If al-Maliki could mend the rift in the Shi'ite vote and cut a deal with the INA (which won 70 seats), that combination alone would put him just four seats shy of a majority...
...Sunnis are having none of it. Having boycotted the 2005 election, they participated en masse this time, handing Allawi what they consider to be a clear victory. Some leading members of his bloc have warned that violence would be the consequence if the Iraqiya list were denied what they consider to be their right to lead the government. Iraq's Sunnis have been suspicious of the Shi'ite-led government of al-Maliki, not without reason, and there has been an acute sense of betrayal among the former insurgents who joined the Sunni Awakening, which facilitated the success...
...Allawi may be stoking resentment by blaming any move to keep him out of power on meddling by Tehran. "Iran is interfering quite heavily, and this is worrying," he told the BBC on Tuesday, noting that the Iranian leadership had invited the other major factions but not his own for talks in Tehran over the shape of the next Iraqi government...
There may be an element of truth in that charge, because Iran has previously backed the broad Shi'ite-Kurdish alliance that brought al-Maliki to power, and is clearly pressing for another friendly, Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad. Allawi is fiercely antagonistic toward Tehran, and his bloc was strongly backed by Sunni Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, which are leery of Iranian influence in Arab lands. (Those governments have been standoffish toward al-Maliki.) (See pictures of the U.S. troops in Iraq...