Ahmad Chalabi, a onetime favorite of the Pentagon’s, has proposed a plan that, if approved by Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, will allow Chalabi and his fellow Governing Council members to approve a slate of candidates for the “caucuses” to be held in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Chalabi’s plan calls for the provincial caucuses to select candidates for the assembly from the approved list. Governing Council members who support the proposal say the candidates would not be “clones” of the 25 Governing Council members, and that other Iraqi political parties should also be able to propose a slate of candidates, with vetting by the CPA. But most of those parties are small and weak. Only the parties represented on the Governing Council have a national organization. While dealing with the Governing Council’s power grab, Bremer must also find a way to satisfy the country’s leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has demanded direct elections understandably, given the country’s Shiite majority.
