Allawi's Next Moves

After narrowly winning Iraq’s elections, Ayad Allawi now faces a new political minefield: a prime minister who doesn’t want to leave, a secretive government panel bent on his destruction, a long and messy government formation process where he’ll have to fight to keep his own alliance together, and the tall task of convincing both Kurds and religious Shiites that the former Baathist can be their leader, too. He’s got 91 seats, while his closest rival, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, has 89. In Iraq’s 325 seat parliament, the magic number to form a government is 163. So what are Allawi’s next moves?