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03/04/2010

Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, 65, lives in the former Brazilian embassy, one of Baghdad's most beautiful and hospitable houses, filled with historic portraits, exquisite Persian rugs and brilliant conversation. Western diplomats rave about the dinners Chalabi gives.

Dr. Ayad Allawi, 64, has set up the headquarters of his campaign list in a functional building where a local group of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party used to meet. It is a drab, bunker-like place with soiled wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning that rattles in the summer and heating that doesn't work in the winter. But none of this matters, because the candidate, a former prime minister, is mostly traveling abroad and doesn't spend much time in Iraq.

Both men are Shiites and in their sixties, and they have known each since they were fellow students at a Jesuit school in Baghdad. And both are waiting for this Sunday, when the Iraqis elect a regular parliament, for the second time since the overthrow of the dictator. With almost 19 million voters, 5,500 candidates and 50,000 polling places, the election promises to be a celebration of democracy. In fact, it is so important to the government that it has declared a five-day national holiday, has barred Iraqis from carrying weapons for two days and has even banned vehicles from the roads on the day of the election, to reduce the risk of attacks.

Both Chalabi and Allawi hope that the Sunday of the election will signal a move for one of them, to the place where a third man currently presides in the office of prime minister: Nouri al-Maliki, 59. He lives and works in the heavily secured Green Zone, in a villa on the banks of the Tigris River, a place filled with makeshift solutions, where foreign dignitaries are often forced to spend hours waiting -- in a garage that has been repurposed into a reception room, complete with damask curtains and heavy armchairs -- to meet with the prime minister.

Holding on to Power

A year ago, it seemed clear that the incumbent would win the election. Al-Maliki, who up until then had been an unknown politician, came into office more than four years ago as the divided Shiite camp's compromise candidate. He has held onto power despite the many catastrophes of postwar Iraq, proving to be a tough negotiator with the Americans and, for Iraqis, a premier who was willing to take on his allies if necessary. He won provincial elections early last year. The threat of a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims seemed to have been averted, and Iraq had what many of its citizens felt it had always needed: an authoritarian leader who ruled the country with a heavy hand.

The series of serious attacks since August have, to an extent, diminished this reputation, but al-Maliki remains the most popular politician in Iraq. Back in 2007, American Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack wrote that al-Maliki was a "weak man in a weak position." That description no longer applies. The determination with which Maliki drove Shiite militias out of the southern city of Basra and fought Kurdish peshmerga fighters, the tenacity with which he convinced the outgoing US President George W. Bush to agree to a faster withdrawal of US troops, and the coolness with which he attempted to block a shoe that was thrown at Bush during a news conference -- these are all achievements and impressions that could help secure reelection for al-Maliki.

It is a bad sign, though, that two of his main challengers in this election are the same two politicians who were among his strongest contenders in the 2005 vote. It's a fact that shows that the underlying conflicts that took Iraq to the brink of civil war and partition remain unresolved, as Shiite Iran and Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors contend for dominance in Iraq. Chalabi and Allawi each symbolize one of the sides in this conflict.

Bizarre Transformation

For Western observers, Chalabi is Maliki's most surprising adversary. The upper-class and at times flamboyant Chalabi, who was a key player in postwar Iraq, has undergone an amazing transformation. From being a close ally of the Bush administration's hawks in Washington, who pressured the US to invade Iraq on the strength of notoriously unreliable intelligence sources, he has turned into the most successful lobbyist for Tehran's mullah-controlled regime in Baghdad.

Chalabi is responsible for a manipulation that already calls the legitimacy of the election into question. Even though he is a candidate himself, Chalabi, as chairman of the government's Justice and Accountability Commission, ordered more than 500 of the original 6,000 candidates to be disqualified from running for office -- on the strength of vague claims, which have never been specified or made public, of their "closeness" to the banned Baath Party.

The most prominent politician on the list of banned candidates, which was eventually whittled down to just over 170 names, is the secular Sunni Saleh al-Mutlaq, 58, head of the National Dialogue Front. He is a man on whom the Americans had pinned hopes this time around. They believed that al-Mutlaq could prevent a large-scale boycott of the election by Iraq's Sunni minority, something which happened in 2005 and which created a catastrophic imbalance in Iraq's political structure.

When a dejected and angry al-Mutlaq tried, along with the other politicians on the blacklist, to contest his exclusion, he received a cryptic note from Chalabi's commission, telling him that he would be well advised not to even try, because the evidence against him was "very strong."

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• Part 1: Sectarian Tensions Overshadow Iraq Election
• Part 2: Fears of Flare-Up in Terrorism