Defeat has come nevertheless, and so has acceptance, perhaps inevitably.

More than nine months after Iraq’s election propelled him to the brink of toppling his main political rival, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and a month after he vowed he would not join Mr. Maliki’s new government, Mr. Allawi indicated on Wednesday that he would join it after all. That appeared to remove the last major obstacle to Mr. Maliki’s formation of a new government, something he must do by law before Dec. 25.

Mr. Allawi did so grudgingly and with conditions, warning that an agreement brokered by the United States to form a broad power-sharing coalition government under Mr. Maliki’s leadership could still unravel.

“As long as it doesn’t fall apart, as long as there is power sharing, then all of us are committed, and I am personally committed to this,” Mr. Allawi, 65, said in an interview in his heavily and increasingly fortified office beside Zawra Park.

Mr. Allawi’s near-concession to a new political reality reflected the coy, stubborn and at times bare-knuckled brinkmanship that has left Iraq politically adrift for most of 2010 — and could yet drag it into new crises as the last American troops are to withdraw next year.

Much remains uncertain, with negotiations still underway to determine what role and powers Mr. Allawi will have as the chairman of a newly created committee to oversee national strategic issues.
Officials predicted that, in keeping with Iraq’s politics all year, Mr. Maliki would not be able to announce a final deal until the 11th hour.

Mr. Allawi, a Shiite who served as an interim prime minister after the American invasion in 2003, led an electoral bloc of secular Shiites and Sunnis that won the largest number of seats in the March 2010 election — 91, compared with 89 won by Mr. Maliki’s coalition. But Mr. Allawi’s bloc, known as Iraqiya, proved unable to forge an alliance with any other parties until it was too late.

Mr. Maliki, a dour, marginally popular leader opposed by most of the country’s political class, managed to tenaciously rally a majority of seats in the new 325-member Parliament. He allied with the followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr and then with the Kurds, despite the fact that both opposed his reelection to a second term.

That left Mr. Allawi with few choices other than to join the new government in a diminished role or to remain in opposition, without the perks and power of elected office — a concept that remains a novelty in Iraq.

“This is not what we planned or wanted,” one of Iraqiya’s Shiite lawmakers, Sheik Jamal Batik, said on Wednesday, “but honestly, we need to be in the joints of the Iraqi state in order to breathe through it.”

Iraqiya’s slow but steady descent — from top vote-getter to secondary player under a loathed rival — frustrated Mr. Allawi’s supporters. Many of them are Sunnis who view a Shiite-dominated government under Mr. Maliki with deep suspicion, if not explicit hostility.

“Allawi won 91 seats,” said Jassim Mohammed Ali al-Akam, an elderly hotel owner in Baghdad, expressing disappointment at Mr. Allawi’s ability to build on his electoral success, “but he could not win 92.”

The Sunnis under the Iraqiya banner have not been shut out. Osama al-Nujaifi became speaker of parliament, and Mr. Allawi said that Iraqiya coalition would hold 11 of 38 ministerial posts in the new government.

And the creation of the new strategic council — proposed and pushed by the Obama administration — could yet give Mr. Allawi a powerful voice. The council, whose exact name and composition are not yet established, is intended as a counterweight to a powerful prime minister’s office. Whether it has veto power over decisions by Mr. Maliki, however, remains unclear. And by its very design, the council appeared to undermine the authority of the Parliament itself. Parliament is now scheduled to debate the council’s power during a session on Saturday.

Mr. Allawi, expressing few regrets, said that from the beginning he cared less about posts than about creating a truly representative, inclusive government. (The American interest in Mr. Allawi’s participation was punctuated by yet another meeting with the American Ambassador, James F. Jeffrey, just before the interview on Wednesday.)

“This issue here is how to form this coalition and how to form a power-sharing basis for the future,” Mr. Allawi said, “because I feel this is very important for the country and for getting democracy cemented and getting the transitional period out of the way.”

Even his supporters, though, indicated that Mr. Allawi had to be pressed by his own alliance to join Mr. Maliki’s government. “If things were left to Allawi, I think he would not have chosen to accept the post,” said Ahmad al-Muhanna, an Iraqiya member. He said the coalition’s Sunni members “depended on Allawi to bring balance inside the government.”

Mr. Allawi, for his part, blamed the interference of Iran, which pressed for a Shiite-led government, despite its own differences with Mr. Maliki. Mr. Allawi blamed the delay in forming a government on legal and political challenges to the election results. But he did not directly blame Mr. Maliki himself.

“We are not enemies personally,” he said. “We have different programs, yes. We have different backgrounds, yes.” He explained that a breakthrough came during a meeting between the two men on Tuesday night. It was unusually conciliatory, given Mr. Allawi’s apparent concession.

“This was the first time,” he said, “that I had a positive meeting with him.”


Yasir Ghazi, Duraid Adnan and Khalid D. Ali contributed reporting in Baghdad