Geopolitics.
The Prime Minister of Iraq will be one Eyad Allawi; he will serve as the head of the government. The President of Iraq will serve as the head of state.
Although the comparison is general at best, the best known of this type of arrangement is that of Great Britain, where Tony Blair is the Prime Minister and Queen Elizabeth II is head of State. (In the United States, the President is head of both government and state.)
Though they had promised to select a President by the close of business Monday, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) has failed to do so. The IGC, or most of ‘em, are said to favor a gentleman named Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, the current IGC President. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) is said to favor 81-year-old Adnan Pachachi, a pre-Saddam Iraqi foreign minister. (Nelson Mandela springs to mind, but that is simply that gravitas which comes with age.) The UN envoy, the Algerian anti-Semite Lakhdar Brahimi, is also said to favor Pachachi.
Both men are Sunni Moslems to Allawi’s Shi’ite background.
From the AP via Canada’s Montreal Post:
A council member said the U.S. and United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi favoured [sic] former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi, who supports keeping foreign troops in Iraq until the security situation is stabilized.
The Canadian head of government is Prime Minister Paul Martin, while the head of state is Britain’s QE II represented by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.
As a matter of personal preference, I would be more comfortable with Pachachi. He has the “Nelson Mandela” age-related gravitas along with that brought by service in the pre-Saddam Iraqi government.
