WONDER LAND

By DANIEL HENNINGER
Harold's List

Iraq's President
Talks of Saddam
And Better Days

Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, is sitting at a long table set in the middle of a hotel ballroom in Manhattan. This is U.N. Week in New York, the annual opening of the General Assembly. It is 8:30 in the morning and he is talking about Saddam Hussein. The trial of Saddam will begin as scheduled Oct. 19, it will be public and "it will last months." There have been reports that the trial would be limited to a single event -- the 1982 massacre in Dujail of 150 Shiites. Mr. Talabani said the trial will extend well beyond the events in Dujail.

"At first Saddam refused to talk," Mr. Talabani said. The former dictator would not discuss the operational military details of alleged Baathist crimes elsewhere. "Then a young Iraqi judge, a very clever man, said to him, 'I'm very sorry to see the ex-president of Iraq is a coward.' Saddam said, 'I am coward? I can answer every question.' After that, he talked."

While Mr. Talabani is speaking to his interviewers -- writers and editors from The Wall Street Journal -- a man in a suit passes behind the Iraqi president and returns to quietly place a plate before him. It holds three peeled, glistening hard-boiled eggs, sauteed mushrooms and bread. The man returns with a small plate of fresh fruit. President Talabani has tucked a linen napkin into his collar. He is ready to eat.

The Iraqi president looks at his un-plated guests, and with the aplomb of a skilled politician smiles and insists that they get up from their chairs, go over to a table nearby and get some food. "I invited you to breakfast," says the president, beaming.

Mr. Talabani, a hearty man at 72, represents a country presented to the world daily on TV and in print as falling into an insurgent abyss of bombs and blood. Amid this, he conveys remarkable calm and confidence.

"Two weeks ago I was in Najaf," he says of the holy city (pop., 560,000) in the Shiite south. "I went into the streets and into the people and it was calm." He claims that 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are quiet: "All Iraq is not Fallujah and Tal Afar."

It no doubt requires a deep reservoir of equanimity to keep the constitutional process moving forward amid events like Wednesday's mass bombings in Baghdad. Mr. Talabani, arguably the most popular political figure in fractious Iraq, brings to this project a personal history built from political stress.

At 13, he is said to have begun a secret association of Kurdish students. At 14 he joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Back then, in the 1940s, his opposition was the Hashemite monarchy, which denied him entry to medical school. Fortuitously, he became a lawyer, journalist and ultimately a leader of the 25-year Kurdish resistance to Saddam's Baathist dictatorship. In April he was appointed to the presidency by the popularly elected National Assembly and is now, in effect, the public face of the new Iraq.

New Iraq's ability to get as far politically as it has turns in no small part on its major players acting responsibly, rare in any nation but noteworthy in a country widely predicted to be heading inevitably to civil war. The Kurdish Mr. Talabani is one such person. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, leader of the south's Shiites, is another, as Mr. Talabani explained:

"In the 1920s when British forces came to Iraq, Shiites resisted and they lost everything. This time the Shiites did not make that mistake. For example Sistani, he doesn't call the foreign forces 'occupiers'; he calls them 'guests.' Tell 'the guests' to do so and so. The Sunnis have repeated the mistake of the Shiites of the '20s. Now the Sunnis understand they made a big mistake, and they are trying to improve relations with the United States."

Mr. Talabani also singled out another of Iraq's leaders, the oft-criticized Ahmed Chalabi. "Among civilians, Dr. Chalabi especially has been active in preventing war between Sunnis and Shiites," he said.

But while the Sunnis are starting to understand where their best interests lie, they lack a political center just now. The Kurds and Shiites, Mr. Talabani explains, are relatively cohesive as political entities, but the Sunnis are divided into small, often tribal groups: "Saddam didn't permit any kind of Sunni leadership to emerge." Right now, he said, the Sunnis need assurance that the government can protect them, as in the current joint U.S.-Iraqi offensive against the insurgents in Tal Afar.

Up to now, he said, the anti-insurgent offensives in the Sunni Triangle essentially have amounted to a policy of "liberate and leave." This time with Tal Afar, they intend to stay: "We must keep some forces there or arm local people to defend their freedom."

He acknowledged that Iraq's transition poses a challenge in the region: "All Arab states are afraid of a democracy. A democratic Iraq with different nationalities -- Kurds, Arabs Turkomen, Shiites, Sunnis -- will inspire all the Middle East. The Sunnis of Saudi Arabia, the Kurds of Iran, Syria, Turkey -- when they see this, it will inspire all of them. For that reason none in the Middle East is helpful in having a democratic Iraq." When he is asked to discuss Syria and the current terror inside Iraq, he declines to stay on the record.

At the end, with the three eggs gone, one feels impelled to wish Mr. Talabani good luck. The Iraqis, by now, have earned it.

Write to Daniel Henninger at henninger@wsj.com