All Intensive Purposes

According to Spencer Ackerman, Ambassador Zalmay "Khalilzad [is] a great diplomat." However, neither Sunnis and Shias in Iraq believe that the U.S. is trying to stay out of a civil war or serve as a "buffer" between Iraq's sects:

[T]here's one thing that's becoming clear in the wake of the reprisal killings of Sunnis: The U.S. buffer isn't holding. Saleh Mutlaq, one of the most hardline Sunni political leaders, complained to The New York Times that "Sunni leaders felt betrayed that American soldiers did not stop the marauding Shiite militiamen on Wednesday." A member of a different, larger Sunni political faction--which for now has abandoned talks on the shape of the next government--bitterly told the paper the paper that "The security portfolio is in the hands of the Americans, but yesterday we didn't see any Humvees." According to the Times, the U.S. military is waiting for the next 48 hours to decide whether "a more visible American presence might be needed--in effect, sending American forces back into areas that they had turned over to the Iraqis." Mutlaq compares such relative inaction to the decision not to stop the looting that took place after the fall of Baghdad--with the clear implication that, now as then, the consequences will be disastrous, as Iraqis perceive the United States, during a moment of crisis, to be the worst of all things: an indifferent occupier.

As far as I can tell from Ackerman, Khalilzad has

• "attempt[ed] to the curb the Shia death squads" (though the Shia see this as an effort to undercut them),


• tried to persuade Sunnis that the U.S. is not siding with the Shia and Kurds (but "the dynamic appears to have accelerated"), and


• "ask[ed] the Sunni and the Shia to think hard about whether they really want to descend into the abyss" (results: unclear, but not looking good).

At the risk of repeating myself, why does Ackerman think that "Khalilzad's a great diplomat"?

eta: Wikipedia helpfully points to this profile of Khalilzad in The New Yorker, from last December.