A Challenge to Maliki in Iraq

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It's make-or-break time in Iraq. A massive, U.S.-led security operation is under way in Baghdad, but the results have been decidedly mixed. Elsewhere, Sunni terrorists continue to strike with impunity at Shi'a targets — and there's growing fear of a backlash. A critical summit of world powers and Iraq's neighbors is about to take start in Baghdad, setting the stage for prickly verbal exchanges between the U.S. and Iran. In Washington, the Pentagon is looking to send even more American troops to Iraq, despite mounting bipartisan opposition.

Under the circumstances, the last thing Iraq needs now is political instability. Enter Iyad Allawi.

The former prime minister has recently returned to Baghdad after an absence of many months, and he's wasted no time in trying to undermine the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Iraqi political analysts say Allawi is trying to cobble together a caucus of disparate groups — Kurds, Sunnis, former Baathists and secular parties — to pry power away from the Shi'a coalition that dominates the Iraqi parliament. He may already have scored one coup: Fadila, one of the junior partners of the coalition, has announced it is breaking away. It is widely assumed the party, which has its power base in and around the southern city of Basra, will join Allawi's bloc. That's not enough to bring Maliki down, but analysts say Allawi is hoping to drive a wedge between the Shi'a coalition's main groups: Moqtada al-Sadr's faction, Maliki's Dawa Party and the Iran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). (Allawi turned down TIME's requests for an interview.)

But these shenanigans are ultimately doomed: there can be no stable government in Baghdad without the full backing of the main Shi'a parties, which have twice demonstrated their popularity in general elections. (On both occasions, Allawi's own party got less than 15% of the vote.) And the caucus he is trying to build is highly unstable: it is hard to see the Fadila leadership, which loathes everything Saddam Hussein stood for, coexisting with the unrepentant Baathists who make up the Sunni caucus in parliament.

Although Allawi is himself Shi'a, his politics are secular, which is a red flag for the Islamists who dominate the Shi'a coalition. His other great handicap: both Shi'a and Sunni extremists believe he has Iraqi blood on his hands. Shi'a groups loyal to the anti-American cleric al-Sadr (who commands the second-largest block within the parliamentary coalition) have never forgiven Allawi for authorizing the 2004 American crackdown on the Mahdi Army. Sunni hardliners, meanwhile, remember him as the man who signed off on the massive U.S. offensive against Fallujah. Both sides deride him as an American puppet, pointing to his CIA connections during the 1990s, when he was in exile.

Allawi's political credentials are fuzzy. To Westerners — officials and journalists alike — he presents himself as an ardent proponent of democracy; to Iraqis, he claims to be a strongman. Both claims are dubious. For a democrat, he has little or no contact with Iraqi people and one of the worst attendance records in parliament. (His aides cited unspecified health reasons for his absence.) And it's hard to pass for a tough guy in Iraq when you spend more time abroad than in Baghdad. He was scarcely seen or heard from during the worst of the sectarian violence over the past year.

Nor does Allawi's administrative record allow for any hope that he will be any more successful at dealing with Iraq's problems than the hapless Maliki. During his first stint in the job — he was interim Prime Minister from mid-2004 to early 2005 — Allawi presided over a hugely corrupt and inept government, setting in motion many of the problems that would dog his successors. It's worth remembering that he had broader powers then than Maliki does now: he didn't have to deal with a parliament, or with political partners who can barely stand to be in the same room together. If he does maneuver himself back to power, Allawi's second tenure could be even shorter than his first.