Political odd couple a ray of hope for Iraq
By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq -
BAGHDAD, Iraq - BAGHDAD, Iraq—They're Iraq's political odd couple, and their rocky relationship provides a faint ray of hope that maybe the country's Shiite and Sunni Muslims can all just get along.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a Shiite from the religious Dawa party, which battled Saddam Hussein's secular Sunni dictatorship. Mithal al Alusi is a secular Sunni legislator.
"We don't like each other, and we've said that to each other in the past," Alusi said. "But there is a mutual trust. Maliki knows if I tell him something, I mean it. I don't care if he likes it or not. ... This is Iraq, it is not a joke."
The two met during the 2003 campaign to purge members of Saddam's Baath party from the Iraqi government and military. Alusi thought that rehabilitating some Baathists could help prevent a new brand of fascism from taking root; al-Maliki thought no Baathist could be redeemed.
"I was trying in my plan to open a bridge, a psychological bridge between the Baathists and the new system," Alusi said. "Mr. Maliki was trying with another course to go harder."
The two got off to a rough start.
Alusi said he was thrown off the de-Baathification committee after he visited Israel and argued that Iraq and Israel should have diplomatic relations. Al-Maliki and the committee's chairman, secular Shiite and former Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, accused Alusi of being a Zionist spy. Alusi responded by threatening to kill al-Maliki if the Shiite leader didn't stop harassing his followers.
Unlike his predecessors and despite the conventional wisdom that he's a weak leader, al-Maliki seeks counsel from outside his party and Iraq's governing Shiite coalition, even from people he doesn't like.
When al-Maliki became prime minister last May, Alusi, whose two sons were killed a year ago by gunmen who opened fire on his family and him, abandoned the government. Al-Maliki wouldn't let him go, however, and when Alusi refused to support al-Maliki's government, the prime minister asked for his advice.
When al-Maliki was due to address the U.S. Congress last summer, Alusi acted as his secret envoy and advance man in Washington.
"Where is your speech?" Alusi asked. Al-Maliki handed it to him.
"My God. We have to take our luggage and go back," Alusi said he told al-Maliki.
Alusi told al-Maliki that his speech was much too harsh on Israel for the American audience. When Alusi threatened to leave, as if the two were bargaining in a shopkeeper's stall, al-Maliki took his advice and toned it down.
"He knows my position, but he knows also for me there is only one standard, Iraq," Alusi said. "He has Iraq in his heart. He is an Iraqi patriot but in an Islamic way, which I don't like."
Alusi admits that he's worried. Al-Maliki, he said, is isolated from his Dawa party and surrounded by inept advisers, and must make tough decisions. "It's not a good time for Maliki ... the pressure is too high for him," Alusi said.
Chief among Alusi's worries is how al-Maliki will handle the American pressure to uproot Shiite militias—especially the Mahdi Army of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr—without committing political suicide. The Sadrists are al-Maliki's political backers, a counterbalance to Dawa's rival, the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
"I'm so afraid," Alusi said. "I was advising him to be the prime minister for all of the Iraqis. He said yes, but I don't know."
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(c) 2007, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Iraq
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
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