On Sunday night, Baghdad's various sectarian and political factions came together and passed a compromise election bill, backed by 141 of the 195 legislators present. The law clears the way for a January 21 vote, the first national poll since 2005. "There was a lot of discussion, a lot of arguing, but we finally were forced to listen to each other," Kurdish lawmaker Ala Talabani told the Washington Post. "It's a nice feeling?that we're on the path of real democracy."
Disputes among the three largest Iraqi communities?Kurd, Shiite and Sunni?can be bitterly fought. But now the setting is usually in the halls of parliament or Iraq's many media outlets, and these fights don't pose a danger to a unified Iraq.
The sticking point for months in parliament had been oil-rich Kirkuk, a previously Kurdish-dominated city that Saddam Hussein ethnically cleansed and resettled with Arabs. Arab Iraqis were uncomfortable about the growing number of returning Kurds. The compromise allows the use of 2009 voter registration rolls in January but adds safeguards against voter fraud demanded by the Sunni Arabs. Their compromise sounds better than what we normally get in, say, New Jersey.
Local elections in Iraq earlier this year came off without incident, showing how the U.S. surge and counterinsurgency campaign neutralized al Qaeda and the Baathist diehards. With Iraqis feeling more secure, sectarian divisions are being replaced by more prosaic matters, such as conflicting views of the best way to govern Iraq.
The law and the coming elections can build on this progress. Iraqi legislators agreed to move from a "closed" to an "open" voting system in January. This is no mere technical change. In 2005 Iraqis could only pick among a list of parties who would then allot seats in parliament, but this time they can choose individual candidates or parties. Five years ago, most Sunnis boycotted the poll; they won't repeat this mistake again.
The immediate result from the switch to open lists will be to reduce the power and attraction of sectarian parties and enlarge the political field. Iraqis will have a greater choice. Dozens of parties have already sprung up to try to claim their vote. The future parliament will be less obviously riven along sectarian lines, and its deputies should be more directly accountable to local constituencies.
As the country stabilizes, American will be able to withdraw more troops. But Iraq remains fragile. So it would be best to avoid signalling a desire that the U.S. is desperate to leave, or else al Qaeda or Iran or whoever might see an opening to fight again.
In that vein, it was unfortunate to hear the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, welcome the new law on Sunday by saying "What is significant about the [election] date . . . in January is that the troops can be drown down on schedule. We can achieve the January time frame and the responsible drawdown as expected." No, what is significant is not that the U.S. can leave on some Washington timetable, but that Iraq increasingly can govern and protect itself.
The U.S. hopes to come down to 50,000 troops from 120,000 today, before withdrawing at the end of 2011. But the timing isn't Mr. Hill's call. General Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, is supposed to assess security in Iraq 60 days after the election, and then make a decision on troop levels. Let's not pre-empt him.
Even more significant is the lesson that Iraq's progress provides about counterinsurgency and political reconciliation. For years, Senate critics of the George W. Bush "surge"?Jack Reed, Joe Biden and Barack Obama?maintained that a political agreement was necessary before the killing would stop. The current experience in Iraq shows the opposite: That ending the violence was the precondition for democratic compromise. This lesson also applies, most immediately, to Afghanistan.
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