Iraq: SIIC's Al Hakim Opts For Allawi

By Steve Hynd

Here's a turn up for the pundits who have maintained, throughout the U.S. occupation of Iraq, that the Sunni-Shiite rivalry was a systemic divide rather than a created one.

The head of a leading Shiite party has thrown his support behind a secular candidate for prime minister � a major blow to the incumbent Nouri al-Maliki.

The endorsement by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council gives Ayad Allawi a major boost even as anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's followers voted Friday in an unofficial referendum on whom to support.

SIIC leader Ammar al-Hakim said in comments broadcast late Thursday that his party will not join any government without Allawi.

Allawi's Iraqiya list eked out a two-seat lead over al-Maliki's mainly Shiite bloc and both are trying to get enough allies to gain a parliamentary majority needed to form a new government.

Al-Sadr and al-Hakim's parties are partners in a Shiite religious coalition known as the Iraqi National Alliance.

As Ron wrote yesterday, the only certain thing is that folk like al Sadr will still insist that the US leave on schedule. But this move by the Badrists stands as a reminder that war-torn and poverty stricken is not the same thing as politically naive - the Mespotamian region is one of the earliest cradles of civilization and its residents were playing big-boy politics when Western WASP's ancestors were stil squatting in mud huts - and an indication that Iraqi nationalists like Muqtada al Sadr weren't just blowing hot air when they said that being Iraqi was more important than being Shia or Sunni. It makes me wonder how much of that rivalry was manufactured by the occupation as a useful narrative to divide and conquer.

Which in turn makes me wonder some about my oft repeated conviction that Iraq is headed inevitably for back to a "slow" civil war, just about the only thing I agree with Tom Ricks about, although we differ over what the U.S. should do about it: Ricks toes the Odierno line and thinks the U.S. should extend its occupation, I think Iraqis should be given self-determination however they choose to work that out. I'm not backing off from that conviction entirely, though. Maliki's actions before the elections show clearly that there are still Iraqis willing to milk the Sunni-Shia divide for their own ends, and the Arab-Kurd divide has always been, in my opinion, the most explosive of the various factional rivalries that could provide the spark to Iraq's powderkeg.