Post-election prospects, Iraq

Can the Dec. 15 election in Iraq help lead to some form of intra-Iraqi accommodation, and thus to significant progress toward US troop withdrawal and national independence?
Most (but not all) indications so far seem discouraging on this score. The conduct of the election has been hotly contested by, among others, the mainly-Sunni “Iraqi Accordance Front” (IAF) and also the more secular list headed by longtime US ally Iyad Allawi. Of these two contestations, that from the IAF is the one with the greatest potential to prevent the reaching of a national accommodation.
We probably don’t know the true dimensions of the complaint from the IAF yet. AP’s Jason Straziuso reports from Baghdad that the IAF officials have so far “concentrated their protests on results from Baghdad province, the biggest electoral district.” Early returns indicated that the “result” in Baghdad province was that the big Shiite list, the UIA, had won about 59% of the vote, the IAF around 19%, and Allawi’s list around 14%.
But we haven’t even heard any estimates yet of the “result” in the other provinces where Sunnis are present in large numbers and where the IAF might also rightly expect to win a lot of votes. And so far, as Straziuso reports, the IAF hasn’t started to focus on their complaints from those provinces.
Given the total lockdown the country experienced for the days around the election itself, and the very substantial lockdown that the US and their allied forces maintain, in general, in and around most of the country’s heavily Sunni cities, it must be extremely difficult for the IAF’s national leadership even to communicate with its representatives in those areas, let alone to gather any systematic details about the nature of complaints from the many voting precincts in those cities.
According to Straziuso, the IAF warned of, “grave repercussions on security and political stability” if the mistakes claimed (in Baghdad) so far were not corrected. He quoted Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the front, as saying, “we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad. … If this demand is not met, then we will resort to other measures.”
However, Moqtada Sadr, the activist, generally anti-US Shiite cleric who is both on the UIA list and an advocate of strong links with the Sunnis, has reportedly lauded the results of the elections as released so far. This Dec. 19 edition of IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor” summarizes a report from Al-Sabah that said this:

The young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the participation of Sunni Arabs in the elections enhanced the political process. He added that the wide participation of Iraqis in the recent election reflected the vitality of the Iraqi people. Sadr said the people will decide the government’s future. He emphasized that he supports any list that will better serve the people and any government that works for Iraq’s independence. The electoral victory is a victory for Iraq, Sadr added.

The way I read this, it seems likely that Sadr feels that his people did well in the elections– perhaps especially in and around Baghdad, where he has a strong base of support. A particularly strong result for the UIA list in Baghdad would presumably give Sadr a lot more bargaining power in the crucial post-election bargaining for power that is going on right now inside the UIA coalition. (It’s a strange feature of the electoral system that has been cobbled together in Iraq over the past 18 months that people vote for a list without the order of the actual candidates who are part of that list having been agreed and advertised in advance.)
I’ve been trying to read today’s Al-Hayat in Arabic to figure out what might be happening inside the UIA right now. But I don’t really have time to do a good job… (Help, Salah, Shirin, anyone?) Anyway, toward the end of this article there , it says,

… sources close to the UIA confirmed that disagreements had broken out between its principal parties over the position of prime minister. And the sources, which preferred not to be named, told al-Hayat that, “The sharp disagreements over the premiership between the Daawa Party led by Ibrahim Jaafari and SCIRI, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, have not yet been resolved.”
And they added that SCIRI rejected this [unclear what], referring to “its bigger mass following and its larger number of seats and that if it hadn’t been for SCIRI the UIA would only gotten half as many votes”. And they noted that, “the other disagreements center on the terms offered by the representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr in the list and which are represented by the need not to deny positions [i.e. jobs] of soveriegnty and ministerial [responsibility] and the participation of all the winning lists regardless of their ministerial weight, in the formation of a government of national salvation.”
And the sources confirmed that, according to the contacts that the American administration in Iraq, as represented by its ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the [contest over the] premiership is reserved between Adel Abdul-Mahdi [of SCIRI] and Iyad Allawi and that Zad [i.e. Khalilzad] doesn’t support the candidacy of Ibrahim Jaafari, and he prefers to save the security-related ministries for parties that don’t have militias…

We could also note that Jaafari’s (out-going) administration has really been hobbled in recent days by the (US-imposed) decision it took the day after lat week’s election, to increase fuel prices by around 2,000%…
Anyway, there is clearly a lot of politics going on inside the UIA there… SCIRI head Hakim has been quoted in Hayat and elsewhere as saying some pretty triumphalist things about how the UIA has now definitievly won the election so they can go ahead and intensify their “de-Baathification” campaign. That would seem to be a big obstacle to Moqtada Sadr’s aim of finding a good entente with the Sunnis…
Any further contributions that commenters can make to providing good sources, links, and translations about the current politics inside the UIA (or even just improving my rapid little piece of translation there) would be really great. Thanks, friends!