Iraq breakthrough

The following editorial appeared in the Washington Post:

President Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan resembles in many respects the surge launched by the Bush administration in Iraq nearly three years ago - though the president, who opposed the surge, hasn't advertised that fact. So the news that Iraq's legislators had finally agreed Sunday on a law permitting national elections to go forward early next year gave cause for optimism on more than one front.

The elections are crucial to Iraq's transition to a stable government that can ensure security around the country without the help of most of the 120,000 American soldiers still deployed there. After making an early November deadline to pass the law, Iraq's political leaders faced a crisis when the bill was vetoed by a Sunni vice president; for a time it appeared the country's sectarian divisions could undermine the election and drag the country back toward civil war. But at minutes to midnight Sunday, just before another deadline, legislators voted to approve another deal that appears to ensure that the election can go forward in late February - late, but still in time to preserve the U.S. withdrawal timetable.

The larger significance of the accord is that Iraqis are finding ways to work out their divisions through the political system; the White House was right to call Sunday "a decisive moment for Iraqi democracy." Three years ago the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was seen as hopelessly ineffectual, corrupt and sectarian. Yet Mr. Maliki's Shiite party has steadily strengthened as violence has fallen, prompting it to agree to reforms that will increase Kurdish and Sunni representation in the national legislature and discourage voting along sectarian lines.

Remarkably, many of the "political benchmarks" laid out by President George W. Bush for Iraq in January 2007 still have not been met. There has been no national oil law, no reform of the constitution, no settlement of the dispute over the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. Violence in Iraq has nevertheless dropped precipitously and continues to do so. Last month, fewer than 90 Iraqi civilians died, compared with about 3,500 in November 2006. One lesson of this record could be that counterinsurgency operations have the potential to drastically reduce violence even in the absence of decisive improvements in national government. Another is that positive political change may not follow the course laid out for it by planners in Washington. Iraqis are muddling toward accommodation in their own way and at their own pace.

They don't always do it on their own, however. The White House said that both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden made calls Sunday to Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. Reports from Iraq said they pressed him to accept the compromise; a White House statement said they also confirmed "the U.S. commitment to a long-term relationship with Iraq." If a successful finish to the Iraq mission is to be secured, that sort of intervention, and that commitment, will be needed for some time to come. The same, of course, applies to Afghanistan.