Foreign influences on the formation of a ruling coalition in Iraq

Min­utes after the offi­cial announce­ment of elec­tion results, Allawi talked to his sup­port­ers say­ing the fol­low­ing:

Iraq is ready to extend a hand of broth­er­hood to all neigh­bor­ing coun­tries, (such as) Syria, Saudi Ara­bia, Turkey, Iran, Jor­dan and Kuwait, on the basis of nonـinterference …

The inter­est­ing part of the above, is that Allawi didn’t name the U.S. in the list of coun­tries that play a cru­cial role in Iraqi politics.

Expec­ta­tions indi­cate, that the results of the Iraqi elec­tion, will acti­vate the influ­ences of the third par­ties inter­fer­ences, and in par­tic­u­lar Saudi Ara­bia, Iran region­ally, the U.S. and UK at the inter­na­tional level.

- Saudi Ara­bia: Leaked infor­ma­tion revealed that Riyadh had pro­vided Al-Iraqiya Coali­tion at least one bil­lion dollars.

- Iran: Focuses most of its sup­port on the Iraqi National Alliance (Al-Ja’afari) and, to a lesser extent, on the State of Law (Al-Maliki).

- U.S.: Adopted the dou­ble stan­dards prin­ci­ple, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for Wash­ing­ton to ben­e­fits in any cir­cum­stances. While Wash­ing­ton expressed its pro­fessed sup­port for the State of Law (Maliki), it also demon­strated its strong sup­port for Al-Iraqiya (Ayad Allawi) through Saudi Ara­bia with the Kingdom’s posi­tion as a proxy in Iraq’s polit­i­cal arena.

- UK: Con­fi­den­tial­ity pol­icy not to anger Wash­ing­ton, and Saudi Ara­bia; this approach allowed the UK to achieve some suc­cess. The UK sup­ported as many Iraqis live in the UK as pos­si­ble, in order to sup­port and strengthen Al-Iraqiya.

Al-Qabas revealed that the British For­eign Office has called Shi­ite fig­ures out­side Iraq to express its desire to nom­i­nate Allawi, and the need to pro­mote this desire through spe­cial rela­tion­ships with the par­ties concerned.

Exter­nal pres­sures on the for­ma­tion of Iraq’s new rul­ing coali­tion, would be rep­re­sented in the following:

- Wash­ing­ton and Saudi Ara­bia will pres­sure for the estab­lish­ment of an alliance between the Al-Iraqiya (Ayad Allawi) and the Kur­dis­tan Alliance (Tal­a­bani — Barzani) in order to allow secure block (91 +43) which is equiv­a­lent to 134 seats. For the remain­ing 29 from the 163 seats required for the PM post, Wash­ing­ton — Riyadh will secure the sup­port of the small-blocs, as well as to cause divi­sions and splits among Maliki’s, and Ja’afari’s supporters.

The above is more a Saudi agenda than a U.S. one. The Amer­i­can pre­fer to see a gov­ern­ment con­tains both Allawi and Maliki ~ U.S. embassy in Iraq spokesman Philip Frayne telling Al-Sabah newspaper:

It is impor­tant that there is no par­tic­u­lar party imposes its author­ity over the major­ity of the peo­ple, and the new gov­ern­ment will be formed a con­sen­su­ally, involv­ing var­i­ous com­po­nents of the Iraqi people.

Also, Al-Qabas reported:

Wash­ing­ton advised Saudi Ara­bia to “widen” the range of its talks with Iraq.

- Iran will keep its sup­port within the Shi­ite reli­gious frame­works, and in this regard, infor­ma­tion says that Tehran has begun to act in terms of build­ing a large Shi­ite coali­tion includes State of Law (Maliki) and the Iraqi National Alliance (Ja’afari), to ensure a major­ity of (89 +70) makes it an equiv­a­lent of 159 seats, which needs four more seats only to achieve the required 163 seats.

The Iraqi scene is full of sur­prises and unex­pected scenarios:

There are pres­sures from the Shi­ite polit­i­cal blocs and the gov­ern­ment to reac­ti­vate the Jus­tice and Account­abil­ity deci­sion to exclude few can­di­dates, most of the them are from Al-Iraqiya list (the total is about 19 seats).

This can turns the table against Allawi at any moment, espe­cially since the cur­rent Iraqi politi­cians have mas­tered the polit­i­cal maneu­vers game, and thus it is pos­si­ble, and by the influ­ence of political-money, to turn some MPs in Allawi’s List to vote in the par­lia­ment to lift the immu­nity of the 19 seats.

Accord­ing to the cur­rent devel­op­ments, Tehran started to “decap­i­tate” Al-Iraqiya List through the cre­ation of (at least the min­i­mum) agree­ment between INA (Jaa­fari) and SoL (Maliki).

We can not clas­sify Syria among the above, because of its unique posi­tion. Against the pres­ence of the U.S. forces and Anti-occupation of Iraq, some dif­fer­ences with Saudi Ara­bia (agreed to together lately on the Iraqi issue) and close ties with Iran.

Among all these mixed posi­tions, Syria sup­ports Allawi and his Iraqiya List as revealed today on Al-Quds Al-Arabi:

Syria will be fully ded­i­cated to the con­di­tions of form­ing an Iraqi gov­ern­ment, because it is the most impor­tant gov­ern­ment in the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of Iraq era, and per­haps Syria, accord­ing to some Iraqi sources, will encour­age Ammar Al-Hakim of the Supreme Coun­cil in sup­port Allawi. Accord­ing to source Syria and Turkey will pres­sure the Kur­dis­tan Alliance to sup­port Allawi.