All Intensive Purposes

Spencer Ackerman writes about U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and the challenges he faces following the bombing of the Askariya shrine this week. We get the obligatory praise of Khalilzad, but this time flavored with a little more about what he has been trying to achieve:

Since Khalilzad's arrival in Iraq last year, he's been the best U.S. envoy conceivable, moving the United States beyond its alignment with the Shia and the Kurds and toward an engagement with Sunni factions that the United States had previously spurned as an undifferentiated enemy. And if Khalilzad couldn't heal sectarian divides--that's surely beyond the capability of any foreigner--he proved able to keep an incredibly precarious political process alive in the hope that its progress can ultimately alleviate sectarian distrust.

So those are his goals. But what is he doing? A lot of cajoling. But we've already used buckets of carrots, and does anyone really fear the stick? Towards the end of the piece, we get a glimpse: "just this week he suggested an interruption of U.S. aid would result if the new government is too Shia-heavy." Maybe. Is there any reason to think he has President Bush on board that plan?

At any rate, the carnage this week suggests that all the talk about Khalilzad's diplomatic prowess have obscured facts on the ground:

For the last several months, the United States was so secure in the belief that the political process had secured Shia interests that it turned its attention to mollifying the Sunnis. The bombing and the outbreak of reprisal killings by Shia militiamen have shattered that assumption, and they risk turning Khalilzad's laudatory political strategy--that is, restraining the Shia in order to reach, at the least, a sectarian balance in governance--into a potential casualty of Samarra.

So what, really, has he accomplished? It's still unclear to me, except that Khalilzad has managed to deeply impress the (relatively few) American journalists who are still trying to understand Iraqi politics. But perhaps they don't have a window into those politics that doesn't have Khalilzad next to it, explaining to them what they are seeing. The strategy may be laudatory, except when you consider where it's led us.

Not that the state of Iraq is Khalilzad's fault. Perhaps the whole enterprise was flawed from the start.

The Titanic, of course, was the most impressive passenger liner ever built. Had you stood next to the captain on the bridge as he steered through the North Atlantic, you might well have be impressed with his command of the ship, his knowledge of the sea, his authority over his crew, his concern for the well-being of his passengers, his skill and intelligence and manner. You might spend more time listening to him than looking out into the dark ahead of you.