Iraqi pre-election political map – The Shiites scene

The coali­tion encour­aged the adopt of this idea on grounds that it will encour­age more polit­i­cal par­ties to join a coali­tion for the flex­i­bil­ity in decision-making.

- I pointed out that “Asaib Al-Haq” will be Sadrists’ future prob­lem (see below). Awan reported that “Asaib Al-Haq” sent a del­e­ga­tion to Qom — Iran to nego­ti­ate a peace­ful solu­tion of the return of the orga­ni­za­tion to the Al-Sadr Trend.

Shi­ites

I am not going to count and name the polit­i­cal blocs and par­ties joined INA (or UIA) because this is already done by oth­ers, but I can add this:

The “ping pong” game of “who will join INA” (Allawi or Maliki) is part of the “silent ten­sion” between the Sadrists and the Supreme Council.

Enjoy­ing the Shi­ites major­ity sup­port (com­pared with other Shi­ites polit­i­cal blocs), the Sadrists will try to mar­gin­al­ize ISCI, Muq­tada Al-Sadr already made this very clear in his last offi­cial state­ment:

The arrival [choos­ing in the upcom­ing par­lia­men­tary elec­tions] of the unqual­i­fied and those who want the occu­piers to stay, is a shame­ful act…I am sure that the votes of the faith­ful are not for sell…

This remark described as a hur­dle by other INA mem­bers, Al-Sadr banned the par­tic­i­pa­tion of reli­gious cler­ics in the elec­tion and this is one of the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between Al-Sadr Trend and Supreme Coun­cil. This will be one of a many future dis­putes between the two.

He already said this before, Al-Sadr inter­view with Aljazeera 31-03-2008:

17:17 “Any­one. Any cleric should not get involved in polit­i­cal ser­vice. You can watch over pol­i­tics, with your eyes and your head, but you can’t force the tur­ban into a party, or into a gov­ern­ment .… but this does not mean the sep­a­ra­tion between reli­gion and pol­i­tics. Reli­gion is pol­i­tics and pol­i­tics is religion.”

While the Sadrists nego­ti­ate with Allawi to join INA to elim­i­nate the Supreme Coun­cil chances, Ammar Al-Hakim restarted “his own” nego­ti­a­tion with Maliki to limit AL-Sadr’s “major­ity effect”.

Update — After I wrote this, it seems that the Sadrists suc­ceeded to bring Allawi to INA, after arrang­ing a secret visit for Allawi to Iran.  Supreme Coun­cil — Dawa failed to reach an agree­ment even after Dawa Party aban­doned “Maliki as the next Prime Min­is­ter post” condition(which explains Ammar Al-Hakim’s call of des­per­a­tion).

That will leave the future com­pe­ti­tion on the “Prime Min­is­ter” post between Allawi and Adil Abdul Mehdi — End update.

There is one prob­lem for the Sadrists in the future; the semi-coup inside the Trend led by two pow­er­ful “for­mer” Sadrists lead­ers Qais Khaz­a­ali (leader of “Asaib Al-Haq), Salam Al-Maliki (both were in prison and released lately).

Dawa Party medi­ated with the Eng­lish for their release, I will not be sur­prised if “Asaib Al-Haq” joins Maliki’s “Sate of Law”.

Other par­ties and blocs nom­i­nated to join Maliki’s coali­tion (if it will be announced after the Eid) :

- “Dawa Party/Iraq edi­tion — led by Kudair Al-Khuzai.

- “Mus­tak­loon Bloc” — led by Al-Shahristani.

- “The Mid­dle Trend” — Led by Muwafiq Al-Rubai, already told the media that he pre­fer to wait before join­ing any coalition.

Despite the dis­pute between the Sadrists and the Supreme Coun­cil, but Maliki’s Shi’ite rivals are not con­cerned with the plan­ning of their own future strat­egy, they are more focused on two issues: Under­mine and con­tain Al-Maliki.

Dawa Party started to feel the heat, sources told Al-Hayat that INA’s agenda is to redraw the alliances map in the provinces after the elec­tion, which means: Dawa Party will loss at least 7 provinces.

Enough rea­son to split Dawa into a wing sup­ports join­ing INA (Ali Al-Alak, Abdul Halim Al-Zuhairi, Tariq Najm, Has­san Sunaid), and a wing appose to join INA (Haider al-Abadi, Sami al-Askari, Sadiq al-Rikabi).

What are Maliki’s options?

Maliki will try to gam­ble on two things:

- Maliki’s pub­lic support.

- The US sup­port: Khair Al-Din Haseeb, Iraqi head of the Arab Unity Stud­ies Cen­ter — Lebanon — said the following:

The cur­rent U.S. admin­is­tra­tion will stick with Maliki even after the elec­tion. Two Amer­i­can offi­cials from the National Secu­rity Coun­cil had lengthy inter­views with Maliki, in their report they said that Maliki is linked to Iran.

The Amer­i­cans believe that the polit­i­cal process will “cor­rect itself grad­u­ally”. Our infor­ma­tion also indi­cated that the U.S. admin­is­tra­tion is not really inter­ested in the national reconciliation.