The move also threatens to damage the March 7 ballot by creating a campaign battleground where past quarrels will be exposed rather than healed under a much vaunted but stumbling national reconciliation process, analysts told AFP.

An official blacklist released by the Independent High Electoral Commission on Thursday barred 500 candidates.

However, members of an integrity and accountability committee whose job is to vet applicants and purge unsuitable contenders are themselves facing charges of illegitimacy as they have not been approved by parliament.

The ban proves that the reconciliation process -- almost seven years after Saddam's ouster -- is in trouble, said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq specialist and conflict studies analyst with the International Crisis Group think-tank.

"It might well torpedo Iraq's hopes to have relatively free, fair and inclusive elections," he said.

"It shows that political groups are far from accommodating one another, let alone reconciling. If this decision is not reversed, we might well be facing a new and dangerous escalation of violence," he added.

The general election is the second such vote since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled the dictator Saddam but provoked an insurgency that saw tens of thousands die in sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007.

Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassem al-Obeidi and prominent Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlak, a persistent critic of the government, are among those who have been stopped from taking part.

"The decision to exclude Mutlak and others means Iraq is getting dangerously close to a repeat of the heated, sectarian political atmosphere seen in the December 2005 elections," said Reidar Visser, a noted Iraq analyst.

A much needed debate on how best to improve the war-torn country's prospects, such as repairing its crumbling infrastructure and making best use of a likely surge in oil revenues, is also being overshadowed.

"It means Iraqis will be looking to the past, focusing on settling scores, instead of facing the future and the many specific issues that need to be solved," added Visser who runs the Iraq-focused website www.historiae.org.

The committee itself on Sunday criticised the UN senior representative in Iraq, urging him "to stop interfering," saying it disapproved of his request that the blacklist be shredded.

A UN spokesman in Baghdad declined to confirm or deny whether any such request had been made.

Sunnis largely boycotted Iraq's inaugural post-Saddam parliamentary election in 2005.

That decision cleared the way for a dominant Shiite government to take power which exacerbated Sunni disenfranchisement and deepened the insurgency that later took the country to the brink of civil war.

Baath party membership was a key condition for obtaining a job and gaining promotion in public sector employment during Saddam's regime.

A controversial process of de-Baathification was adopted by Washington diplomat Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, following the invasion which saw thousands of Saddam-era employees lose their jobs.

According to organisers, around 6,500 candidates from 86 parties, comprising 12 coalitions as well as independents, have registered to compete in the March election.

The vote is seen as crucial to consolidating Iraq's democracy and smoothing the path for a complete US military exit by the end of 2011 as planned.

Michael O'Hanlon, a national security and defence policy expert and senior author of the "Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Index" projects at the Brookings Institute in Washington, said the ban was a setback.

"I'm very, very worried about this, the lack of transparency, the quality of the decisions, the huge number of people affected all bode quite badly," he said.

Khalaf al-Alayan, a Sunni MP, meanwhile, insisted the blacklist was illegal, because the committee has not been approved by parliament. "Those decisions will affect the national reconciliation process," he said.

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