The new U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Another Winning appointee

Our Newest Proconsul
Robert Dreyfuss
June 09, 2005

It's a foregone conclusion that the Senate will confirm Zalmay Khalilzad to be the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, replacing John Negroponte. Still, it's worth stepping back to consider what Khalilzad's appointment says about the Bush administration's continuing refusal to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq—and about the Democrats' inexplicable inability to step forward and challenge the president as Iraq continues to deteriorate. His confirmation hearing Tuesday slipped by almost unnoticed, thanks in part to a docile stable of Democrats who decided to give him a free pass, rather than seize the opportunity to lambaste the president's Iraq policy.

First, on the man himself: it's hard to imagine anyone worse than Khalilzad for the Baghdad job. Like one of Alexander the Great's proconsuls, Khalilzad neatly steps into one U.S.-occupied neocolony, Iraq, from another, Afghanistan. Khalilzad, born in Afghanistan, has been deeply involved in U.S.-Afghan policy for more than two decades. He is arguably as much to blame as anyone for the catastrophic mistakes that led first to that country's civil war, then to the rise of the Taliban, and finally to the Afghanistan of 2005: a warlord-dominated narco-state, in which heroin and opium provide fully half of the gross domestic product, and in which a thriving, Taliban-led Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is recently showing signs of emerging, once again, as a mortal threat to a tottering regime in Kabul. Zalmay Khalilzad, it seems, is getting out just in time.