In Iraq, a preelection power play (Moqtada al-Sadr fights for a top spot)

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1203/p01s02-woiq.html

As parties haggle over candidate lists, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fights for a top spot.

By Annia Ciezadlo | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

SULAIMANIYA, IRAQ – With elections less than a month away, Iraq's would-be politicians are getting a crash course in one of democracy's least glamorous features: preelection backroom haggling.

As the deadline looms for submitting party slates to Iraq's electoral commission, Iraqi candidates are vying for plum positions on the all-important lists, which will determine who gets a seat in Iraq's new national parliament.

In a sense, these backroom bargains are the elections before the elections, pitting big players - mainly well-organized former exiles - against more-popular homegrown leaders, including top Shiite figures, the real king-makers in the process.

"The election is like an exam," says Sheikh Fatih Kashif al-Ghitta, a Shiite cleric from a prominent Najaf political family. " will show who really has a base of popular support and who is a fake; who has religious authority and who does not. It will clarify many things."

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[VegasWolf]

1. If al Sadr gets it, bush will probably make the sovereign Iraq

postpone its elections!

[Streetdoc270]

2. it will be Saddam in a landslide

The Iraqis will want to return to the age of security that was Saddam's rule