The doors of the Iraqi prime minister's office swung open and in walked Condoleezza Rice and the UK foreign secretary Jack Straw.
Their handshakes with Ibrahim Jaafari, the man they hoped to push into resignation, were formal and stiff. Behind them a beaming figure loped forward, thrust out a smiling face, and kissed the prime minister three times on the cheeks.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Baghdad, reaches the parts that no other Western official in Iraq dares to touch. A Muslim born in Afghanistan, who went to university in Beirut, he is as much at home in the local
customs and manners of the Middle East as he is in the
corridors of Washington.
Iraqis respect him for it, even though they have few illusions about his true loyalties. "He'll embrace you while stabbing you in the back," said one Baghdad journalist while watching the Khalilzad-Jaafari clinch on TV earlier this month.
The Bush administration has had three viceroys in Baghdad since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April 2003. After the non-consulting arrogance of Paul Bremer and the low-key plotting of John Negroponte, the gregariousness and hands-on energy of Zalmay Khalilzad came as a relief to Iraq's politicians. Here was a man who would fiddle with worry beads and engage in rambling conversation over thin glasses of tea without an obvious agenda and the usual clock watching.
He uses Farsi (which is close to his native Dari) to talk to Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani as well as to Shiite politicians who spent years of exile in Iran. He was nominated by US President George W. Bush to lead the US talks with Iran, in the hope that his mellifluous linguistic and cultural skills will smooth the tough message he has been told to give.
Khalilzad came to Baghdad last year when Iraqis were nominally in charge of their own country, with an elected transitional government in place of an occupation administration. So his role was more complex than that of his predecessors. He had to flatter Iraqi politicians' wish to be in control of their own destiny even as he coaxed and cajoled them into doing what Washington wanted done.
What made it harder was that the timing and context were
different for Khalilzad. The Iraq which Bremer and Negroponte ran seemed a relatively hopeful place but by the time he came, the Iraqi political class was splitting. Sunnis felt increasingly alienated. The Shiite were toying with ideas of regional autonomy which threatened to undermine the concept of a central government. Anti-American militancy was rising in Shiite as well as Sunni areas. Suicide car-bombing was taking a huge toll in lives.
The American effort to remove the Shiite leader Jaafari, whom Washington considered vain, ineffectual, and insufficiently accommodating to the interests of Kurds and Sunnis, finally succeeded on April 21. It was not Khalilzad's first such delicate assignment.
Four years ago, when he was Washington's man in Kabul, he had to break the will of an even more distinguished figure, Zahir Shah, the former ruler of Afghanistan. As delegates waited for the formal opening of the country's ersatz parliament, word swept round that a majority wanted to nominate the 87-year-old king to be the country's chief executive.
This was not part of the Bush administration's script. Its leader for Afghanistan was Hamid Karzai, a dynamic, English-speaking Pashtu fighter. Khalilzad rushed to see the king and persuaded him to stick to the agreement. This was impressive in itself, but the real Khalilzad touch was to seal it publicly by summoning the media to the heavily fortified US embassy compound.
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