Maleki Forging Alliance With Secular Leaders.

PM Maleki has allied himself with Saleh al-Mutlaq, an outspoken secular Sunni leader in several provinces and broached a coalition with former PM Iyad 'Allawi - a secular Shi'ite opposed to Iranian influences on Iraq. Maleki is also courting Sadr. This suggests the emergence of a new axis of power in Iraq based on a strong central government and nationalism. Like Mutlaq, 'Allawi, Maleki and others in this proposed alliance, Sadr is against Iranian influences in Iraq. But this alliance is also against the KRG of the north.

Negotiations are still under way in most provinces, however, and distrust remains entrenched among nearly all the players and agreements could crumble. But the jockeying after the Jan. 31 provincial elections indicates that politicians are assembling coalitions which cross the sectarian divide ahead of parliamentary elections in December 2009, a vote to shape the country as the US military withdraws.

Maleki's Sunni adviser Anwar al-Luheibi was on March 20 quoted as saying: "There is a new political map. And I anticipate this map will be far better than the one we had before". This marks a departure from politics which have hewed almost exclusively to ethnic and sectarian lines, fomenting the discord that brought Iraq to the precipice of civil war in 2006-07. The talks represent the first round of a great game which may resolve a question unanswered since the fall of Saddam's Sunni/Ba'thist dictatorship in April 2003.

With his strong performance in the provincial elections, Maleki is the front-runner in forging such an alliance, a remarkable ascent for a lawmaker considered weak and pliable when he was put forward as a consensus candidate for PM in May 2006. Forgoing the slogans of his Islamist past for a platform of law and order, his party won a majority of seats on the council in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, and emerged as the single biggest bloc in Baghdad and four other provinces in the south, which has a Shi'ite majority. In most provinces though, his faction of the Shi'ite al-Da'wa al-Islamiya movement must make coalitions if it hopes to help determine who will fill the governorship and other key provincial positions.

Mutlaq, a leading secular politician known for his nationalism and strident opposition to the US occupation, on March 20 was quoted as saying his supporters would ally with Maleki in four provinces: Diyala, Salahuddin, Baghdad and Babel. Mutlaq heads the Iraqi National Dialogue (IND), the second largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament. But his supporters ran under different labels in provincial contests.

Mutlaq said 'Allawi, who led a secular list in the campaign for the Jan. 31 elections, would join the coalition. The convergence of their interests is in stark contrast to the alliances after elections in 2005, which Sunni Arabs largely boycotted. Their refusal to vote gave religious Shi'ites and Kurds disproportionate power in provinces such as Baghdad, Diyala and Nineveh, all with substantial Sunni populations.

In predominantly Shi'ite southern Iraq and Sunni western Iraq, power coalesced around ostensibly religious parties, whose members built their appeal on clandestine organisations in exile, underground networks under Saddam, support from Iran and other neighbours and, occasionally, the end of a militiaman's gun.

This time, some coalitions seem to be based on ideology: a strong central government which Maleki, along with secular candidates such as 'Allawi and Mutlaq, have endorsed, as well as opposition to the kind of federalism espoused by Maleki's Iran-backed Shi'ite rivals, who favour a Shi'ite-ruled zone in the south, and the Kurdish parties of the north. Both Maleki and Mutlaq have rallied support among Arab and nationalist constituents by opposing Kurdish territorial claims, particularly around Kirkuk.

Mutlaq draws backing from among the still numerous supporters of Saddam's Ba'th Party in Sunni regions, and he has long pushed for reconciliation with its members. Despite his reputation as a Shi'ite hardliner when he came to power in May 2006, Maleki echoed Mutlaq's and 'Allawi's calls this month. In a speech, he urged Iraqis to reconcile with rank-and-file Ba'thists, those he described as "forced and obliged at one time to be on the side of the former regime". Maleki declared that it was time "to let go of what happened" in the past.

Mutlaq said he told Maleki in a meeting two months earlier that "there was a time when you stood against me on those issues. 'You should be happy I changed', he told me". Mutlaq joked that first the PM "stole the government from us, and now he's trying to steal our political speech from us". Mutlaq said Maleki had proposed an alliance for the parliamentary elections, too. But, he said, "we're still studying the message". But Maleki is proposing that Mutlaq succeed Talabani as Iraq's president.

Since the fall of Saddam, religious Shi'ites and Kurds had effectively served as the coalition at the heart of power in Iraq. Maleki's emergence has upset that formula, and virtually each component of the Shi'ite alliance has now gone its own way. The bloc which claimed to speak on behalf of long reticent Sunnis has splintered, too, unable even to agree on a replacement for the speaker of parliament who resigned in December.

Fayed al-Shammari, a leader of Maleki's Da'wa faction in Najaf and who will serve on the provincial council there, says he foresees a grand coalition for the December elections that would join Maleki with influential Sunni leaders, elements of the US-backed Sunni awakening movement which turned against the Qaeda-led Neo-Salafi insurgency and perhaps even Sadr, whose Shi'ite followers witnessed a political resurgence in the Jan. 31. Strikingly, the new alliance would not include Maleki's other Shi'ite rivals or Kurds. A hint of that alignment emerged in Waset province, where Maliki's supporters were reported to have joined with 'Allawi's list and Sadr's followers.

Shammari, a Shi'ite Arab of the predominantly-Sunni Shammar confederation of tribes, says: "There is a great possibility for this". But even he questions whether such an alliance could withstand the still-seismic conflicts over the very nature of the Iraqi state, namely its power in relation to the provinces. He says: "With any coalition, you have an ambition for it to be permanent. But ambition does not always match reality".

Mutlaq is an agricultural engineer who grew wealthy under Saddam. He says any future national alliance with Maleki would depend on co-operation in the provincial councils, adding: "We want to see what he is going to give. Is he going to behave as a real partner or is he going to try to isolate the others?" Mutlaq says he is still sceptical, warning: "We don't think Maleki is going to act in a democratic way".

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