Collision Course in Iraqi Politics

Washington's Wishes Run Head On Into Shiite Demands

The haggling over who will become Iraq's new prime minister may illustrate the limits of Washington's influence on the country's politics, according to some online pundits.

Talks among Iraq's Shiite parties resumed on Monday after the Ashura religious festival. The consensus of the online media is that interim vice president Ibrahim Jafari is the leading contender to become prime minister. Ahmed Chalabi, the one-time darling of some neconservatives in the Bush administration turned Shiite nationalist is a surprising challenger.

Jafari is the leader of the Dawa Party, "a conservative religious Shiite group that is one of the country's largest political parties," reports Voice of America He gets good press in Iran where he spent ten years in exile. The conservative Tehran Times recently ran a favorable Agence France Presse profile describing Jafari as a "Shiite modernist" who was "among the first to organize demonstrations opposing the presence of U.S.-led troops on Iraqi soil."

Chalabi, by contrast, was the Bush administration's first choice to run post-Saddam Iraq. In April 2003, the U.S. military airlifted Chalabi and his armed supporters into southern Iraq, right behind advancing U.S. forces. But within a year, the Jerusalem Post notes that Chalabi "fell out of favor with the US when he was thought to have been spying for Iran. His party was also accused of misleading the US by supplying it with false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

In what the Post calls a "remarkable turnaround," Chalabi allied himself with Iraq's religious Shiites and resurrected himself as a nationalist. He embraces radical anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr as part of his bid to become prime minister, according to Paul McGeough, Baghdad correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald

Chalabi's "policy commitments, include a threat to cancel contracts signed by the US and UN-appointed interim government and to drop murder and other criminal charges against his new-found ally, al-Sadr," McGeough writes.

Jafarimade a deal of his own that sidelined another pro-American candidate, according to McGeough. "Jafari emerged as a front runner [last] week when haggling in the victorious United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) eliminated his main rival, the French-educated Adel Abdul-Mahdi."

Mahdi, the finance minister in the interim government, had replaced Chalabi as Washington's favored candidate in recent months, according Agence France Press. and other online news outlets.

Bush administration supporters had applauded Mahdi's criticism of American news coverage of Iraq at the American Enterprise Institutelast October.

Mahdi also makes no secret of his desire to privatize Iraq's oil industry in ways that would benefit U.S. firms. In December, he told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington that Iraq was trying to develop "a new oil law," that would "be open to investment, to foreign investment downstream, maybe even upstream. So I think this is very promising to the American investors and to American enterprises, certainly to oil companies."

Mahdi will have a role in the new government, but probably not the top job, according to McGeough. He reportedly pulled out of the prime minister's race "in return for a promise of at least two ministries." Mahdi might return as a compromise candidate between Jafari and Chalabi, according to an Associated Press story picked up on Monday by the Canadian newsweekly MacLeans and other news outlets.

Whoever wins, Iraq's next prime minister will face conflicts with Washington on two key points, says Dilip Hiro, an Iraqi exile writing in the newsweekly OutlookIndia At stake are the nature of the Iraqi constitution that the new assembly will write and the presence of U.S. troops in the country.

Hiro notes that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Hussein Shahristani, a leader of the UIA, have endorsed calls to make Islam "the sole source of legislation in the permanent constitution."

"While Shiites overwhelmingly favor specifying the Sharia as the sole source of legislation, the Kurdish leaders are not so keen. And the Americans are decidedly against it," says Hiro. "But such a provision in the constitution could be an effective way to conciliate the Sunni militants who want 'the flag of Islam to fly in Iraq.'"