Word: allawi
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...Ayad Allawi answers with the practiced evasion of a seasoned politician when asked whether he'd like another shot at the job of Iraq's Prime Minister. "Definitely not in a sectarian regime," Allawi told TIME at the Baghdad headquarters of his political party, the Iraqi National Accord. "I respect religion. But religion needs to be de-politicized." Despite the gains made by Allawi's secular list in last weekend's provincial elections, the big winner at the polls was the Shi'ite-led alliance of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - who remains the man to beat in the national...
...Allawi, a Shi'ite and former Baathist who was tapped by the U.S. occupation authority to be Iraq's first Prime Minister after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, has always billed himself as stridently secular. But when Iraqis were given the right to choose their leaders at the polls, Allawi lost out to the parties based on Shi'ite and Sunni identity. Since then, he and his party have been working to promote a more secular approach to Iraqi governance, and the preliminary returns released on Thursday for Iraq's provincial elections show they are making gains - at least relative...
...gained in the election is of course unclear. But already many in Baghdad are speculating that the tickets headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi appear poised to make the best showing. Iraqis largely seem content to wait for the final results in any case...
...strongman is just what they need to end Iraq's destructive sectarian politics. But at the polls, Iraqis have shown little appetite for tough guys, preferring to vote for diffuse coalitions of parties with little in common beyond sectarian identity. The cautionary tale for Maliki is Iyad Allawi, the country's first post-Saddam Prime Minister: he, too, portrayed himself as a strongman, but his secular coalition won barely 14% of the vote. "Maliki will go the same way as Allawi," says Abdel-Bari al-Zebari, a Kurdish MP. "Iraqis know that a strongman is not in their best interests...
...liberal secularists are concerned, al-Rubeiy thinks they still have time to attract some of the disillusioned. Of course it would help, he says, if al-Allawi's party and others like it weren't suffering from the same problem as everyone else on Iraq's political stage: lack of unity. "I need one secular party. We need a liberal front," he says. "If we were all together, we would have a great chance - we would take No. 1 in Iraq...