Former PM blames U.S. for foisting democracy on Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Despite repeated warnings, U.S. officials blindly foisted a Western-style democracy on Iraq, helping plunge it into sectarian bloodshed and a political morass, a former U.S.-installed prime minister said on Monday.

"I told President Bush many times. I said we should not photocopy the model of the United States" in Iraq, Iyad Allawi, selected interim prime minister in 2004 by a council hand-picked by U.S. officials, said in an interview with Reuters.

"I said to (Bush and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair) categorically: 'Don't copy the Western model in Iraq; don't copy the Lebanese model; don't copy the Iranian model."

Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who led Iraq for nearly a year at a time when U.S. officials still held many levers of power, had a scathing assessment of Washington's management in close to six years since the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Despite a sharp improvement from the horrific sectarian bloodshed of 2006 and 2007, Allawi described a country still held hostage to religious and ethnic rivalries, one in which ministries remain party fiefdoms and reconciliation is elusive.

"The decision to invade Iraq was a good decision, but unfortunately there have been grave mistakes that have been committed in parallel to liberation," he said, including the fateful U.S. decision in 2003 to purge government of members of Saddam's banned Baath party.

The instant unemployment of tens of thousands of Iraqis not only crippled the country's ability to govern itself but helped fuel a bloody insurgency.

By ignoring a strong tribal structure, interwoven by Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds and Turkmen, as they pieced together post-Saddam Iraq, he said U.S. officials allowed sectarian strife to grow.

"It was the wrong concept of doing things ... These are some of the real mistakes, grave mistakes, that have led the country to a great vacuum which we are suffering from after six years."

SECTARIANISM EXPLOITED

He said elections held in Iraq in 2005 -- in which he lost the premiership after his secular party performed poorly and major religious parties gained strength -- were premature.

He compared the U.S. decision to hasten elections in Iraq with Washington's support for a vote in the Palestinian territories that was won by U.S. foe Hamas in 2006.

Allawi, a doctor, hails from a prominent Iraqi family and was once a Baathist, but became a dissident and worked in exile to rally support against Saddam for years before 2003.

His sharp words came several days after U.S. troops came under Iraqi authority for the first time under a new bilateral pact, hailed by the Bush administration and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as a major step toward restoring Iraqi sovereignty.

But Allawi blamed Maliki, from the religious Shi'ite Dawa party, for perpetuating divisions among Iraqis -- for example failing to enact measures passed by parliament that aim to bring ousted Baath party members back into government.

"Sectarianism still is the order of the day. You can't get a position in the government, even a junior position," without meeting sectarian criteria, he said.

Allawi's secular party hopes to do better at polls this year with Iraqis disappointed by Shi'ite and Sunni religious parties.

(Editing by Giles Elgood)