Reconciliation in Kirkuk

David Ignatius:

With its volatile mix of Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs, this city is often described as a sectarian time bomb. But for now, the bomb is ticking a little more slowly thanks to that rare Iraqi event -- a compromise.

Iraq has had too few of these political accommodations during its downward spiral over most of the past four years. But the Kirkuk deal announced yesterday illustrates that there can be virtuous cycles, too, even in a country as bitterly divided as this one. The success of the U.S. troop surge seems to be bolstering, ever so slightly, the advocates of conciliation and weakening the partisans of sectarian war.

Kirkuk was facing a potentially disastrous Dec. 31 deadline for a referendum on its political future. The Kurds, who claim a majority of the population in the province, wanted the vote, and with it control of Kirkuk's huge oil reserves. The Turkmens and their patrons in Ankara threatened a full-scale Turkish army invasion if the Kurds took power -- and rattled sabers this week with air raids and military attacks across the border against Kurdish rebels. The Arabs, also wary of being displaced by Kurds, were boycotting the provincial council.

It was a classic Iraqi formula for sectarian disaster. Worse, the Turkish raids raised the threat of a wider regional war.

But the Kirkuk bomb was defused, at least temporarily, thanks to two factors that Iraq desperately needs -- internal compromise among its warring ethnic forces and international support from the United Nations. The compromise plan, hammered out by U.S. diplomats working with the new U.N. representative here, Staffan de Mistura, calls for a six-month delay of the referendum while the United Nations assesses the situation. It's a face-saving deal that allows everyone to step back from the brink. And it's the most important U.N. intervention in Iraq since a 2003 car bomb destroyed the organization's headquarters in Baghdad.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unscheduled stop in Kirkuk yesterday to bless the deal and meet with the provincial council that includes all of the battling factions. She told them to fight against Iraq's history of ethnic differences and cited her own experience as an African American child of slavery. She then flew on to Baghdad to convey a similar message about reconciliation to Iraq's battling Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish national politicians.

Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, warns against premature enthusiasm. With the wary skepticism that led President Bush to dub him in jest "Mr. Sunshine" during a recent teleconference, Crocker said in an interview yesterday, "We have some very positive developments, but it is all fragile and could snap back."

Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, in a separate interview expressed a similar guarded optimism: "You don't go here from bad to good. You go from bad to less bad. Progress accumulates."

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Kirkuk is just a small example of the bottom up reconciliation that is taking place through out Iraq and is not necessarily the best. In most, the UN has not been needed to reach compromise. It is probably going to take an election in Iraq to get that compromise on a national level. The importance of this story is that a columnist at the Washington Post is starting to se the difference in Iraq.