Maliki's postelection strategy suggests he is prepared for a long and bitter fight to hold on to power, even if it alienates the country's Sunni community and risks new sectarian warfare. The Iraqi leader is trying all sorts of legal maneuvers to deny victory to his chief opponent, former prime minister Ayad Allawi, whose secular, nationalist bloc won the most parliamentary seats in the March 7 elections and presumably the right to try to form a new government. Even if Al-Maliki sticks with nominally legal measures, he risks serious damage to all the efforts to ease sectarian tensions which had begun to bear fruit three years after the US troop surge. A resurgence of major violence would complicate US plans to withdraw all its forces from Iraq by the end of next year. The showdown has cast a spotlight on Iraq's judicial process, which some have said is far from independent and often subject to outside pressures. And in such a young democracy with little institutional knowledge or precedent upon which to draw, the constitution and laws passed by parliament are not always clear. No issue is potentially more explosive than a committee's attempts to disqualify some winning candidates because of ties to Saddam Hussein's regime. Sunnis view the committee, led by a Shiite with ties to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, as nothing other than a group dedicated to purging Sunnis from government. While Al-Maliki does not directly control the committee, he has certainly benefited from its actions and has done little to deter it. At least four candidates targeted by the committee are from Allawi's party list, which includes many Sunnis and won significant voter support from the minority sect. If a court disqualifies enough candidates to tilt the race in Al-Maliki's favor, that would be a huge provocation to Sunnis. Even before the final vote tallies were announced Friday, Al-Maliki was maneuvering to put himself in a better position, likely sensing the results were not going his way. The prime minister went to the Supreme Court Thursday and asked for a legal definition of what constitutes the largest bloc. The constitution says the coalition with the largest bloc in parliament gets the first crack at forming a government. Allawi's Iraqiya list has argued that this means their 91 seats – Al-Maliki's State of Law list won 89 – give them the first opportunity. But the court ruled that the largest bloc could also be one created after election day through negotiations, giving Al-Maliki time to find new partners and outmaneuver Allawi. If Al-Maliki forms a government with a rival Shiite bloc, excluding Iraqiya entirely, Sunnis could feel disenfranchised, said Meghan L. O'Sullivan, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School and a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq for President George W.Bush.
