Word: allawi
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When Iraq's tough-talking interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan starts talking about postponing the January 30 election, it's clear that the issue is being considered at the highest levels of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's administration - despite official insistence that the poll will go ahead on schedule. Calls for an election delay from within the government aren't new - interim President Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, has publicly called for a UN assessment on the feasibility of voting on January 30. But Shaalan has until now been one of the more bellicose officials in Allawi's government when...
...Allawi reiterated on Wednesday that the poll would go ahead as planned, having had strong indications from Washington and London that the prime sponsors of his government are strongly committed to the date. Given the widely expected dominance at the polls of the Shiite religious parties, the interim prime minister's own tenure will likely be ended as a result of the election. But Allawi is under tremendous pressure from both the U.S. and the Shiite majority to proceed on schedule. For the Bush administration, postponement is too great a concession to the insurgency it has struggled to contain...
...Allawi stressed in a press conference on Wednesday that he has no authority to delay the election. Such a decision rests with the Iraqi electoral commission, which has indicated it would postpone the vote only if staging it became physically impossible. And, Allawi said, any change in the transition arrangements would have to be decided by the UN Security Council...
...Allawi: Damned if He Does, Damned if He Doesn...
...Iraqi security forces with the requisite competence and commitment to fight them. While U.S. officials originally envisaged the insurgents as numbering no more than 5,000 and saw them as comprising former regime loyalists and foreign terrorists - that estimate was later doubled, then trebled - the intelligence chief of the Allawi government, General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, on Monday claimed that the number of insurgents was more like 200,000 - in other words, greater than the number of troops the U.S. has in Iraq. And U.S. military officials and analysts have long-since conceded that most of the insurgents are Sunni Iraqis...