A MAN OF THE SHADOWS.(Iyad Allawi, interim Prime Minister of Iraq)(Biography)

A few days before the New Year, on a crisp, sunny day in the Jordanian capital of Amman, I had tea with Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, on the terrace of an unremarkable limestone villa that serves as the local headquarters for his political organization, the Iraqi National Accord, or the I.N.A. Several Jordanian and Iraqi security men lurked on the edges of the terrace, furtively smoking cigarettes. Only Allawi's American bodyguard, a man wearing the dark suit and dark glasses of an archetypal Secret Service agent, hovered close by. All the windows of an apartment complex overlooking the terrace were shuttered.

Allawi was on a two-day layover in Jordan on his way back to Baghdad, after spending the Christmas holiday with his wife and three children, who live in London. When I arrived at the villa, he was chatting indoors with a Sunni leader, Sheikh Majed Abdelrazzak al-Suleiman, a chief of the influential Dulaimi tribe from Al Anbar province, which includes Ramadi and Falluja, cities that have been particularly plagued by the insurgency against the American occupation of Iraq. I had recently met the Sheikh, a squat, corpulent man, and knew him to be deeply loyal to Allawi, who is a secular Shiite.

An aide led me to the terrace to wait while Allawi and Suleiman finished their conversation. After a while, Allawi joined me outside. A tall, bulky man with a large balding head, a jutting chin, and the lumbering gait of an old prizefighter, he was wearing the uniform of the modern executive: a gray wool suit, burgundy tie, and blue shirt. A young woman brought us mugs of tea, and returned moments later with Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

Allawi will preside over the first national elections in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's removal; the elections are scheduled to take place on January 30th. Allawi himself is running for a seat in the Transitional National Assembly, which will have two hundred and seventy-five members. This body will write a new constitution and select a new Prime Minister. Although Allawi has portrayed the elections as a victory for democracy in Iraq, events in recent weeks have not been auspicious. On December 27th, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Iraqi Sunni political party, pulled out of the elections, citing security concerns; the same day, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the home of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, one of the country's most prominent Shiite leaders, killing fifteen. On January 11th, Allawi admitted in a news conference that "there will be some pockets" of Iraq where violence will prevent people from voting.

The elections were meant to solidify a spirit of Iraqi national unity, but the upcoming vote has only increased the tensions among the country's ethnic groups. The removal of Saddam abruptly disempowered Iraq's Sunni minority, which had ruled Iraq for nearly five centuries. The resulting Sunni hostility toward American occupation forces--and their fears of being subjugated by Iraq's Shiite majority--has inflamed the insurgency. Many Sunnis fear that Shiite parties will win the elections and install an Islamic theocracy closely linked to Iran's. Some Sunni leaders have called for a boycott of the elections.

I asked Allawi whether he was worried that the elections might lead to more violence. If there was a weak Sunni turnout and the Shiites swept the polls, could this deepen the sectarian split in the country and inspire an all-out civil war? Allawi seemed to choose his words carefully, in order to avoid using the word "Sunni." He replied, "I may be wrong, of course, but I don't believe that the ingredients for civil war really exist in Iraq. There are people who are trying to foment religious and ethnic problems in Iraq. The problem of the election is not security; it's the inclusivity. There are those who are trying to prevent this, by telling people not to vote, by attacking and committing crimes. I have been trying to insure inclusivity by talking to people, even on the fringes of the so-called resistance--tribal leaders from Al Anbar, from Mosul, Shias also, and Kurds." (Iraq's minority Kurdish population, concentrated in the north of the country, had flirted with the idea of pursuing independence.)

Allawi told me that he had met with former members of Saddam's Baath Party. (Allawi began his own career as a Baathist in the nineteen-fifties, when he was young, long before Saddam's rise to power, at a time when Baathism represented anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism.) "I ask these former Baathists, what is it you want to achieve--to bring Saddam back, to get the multinational forces out of Iraq? If it's to bring Saddam back to power, forget it--khalas--he's finished. He ended like a rat, hiding in a hole in the ground. This is not respectable. Or if you want to bring bin Laden or someone like him to Iraq, we'll fight you room to room. We won't accept this, ever. If you want to get the multinational forces out, then join the elections. Use your vote to get them out."