This story reports details of one of the worst kept secrets in Washington. Especially after Gen. Casey stepped on his dick (see comments) back on March 19 on Meet The Press.
Secret talks in which senior American officials came face-to-face with some of their most bitter enemies in the Iraqi insurgency broke down after two months of meetings, rebel commanders have disclosed.
The meetings, hosted by Iyad Allawi, Iraq's former prime minister, brought insurgent commanders and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, together for the first time.
After months of delicate negotiations Allawi, a former Ba'athist and a secular Shi'ite, persuaded three rebel leaders to travel to his villa in Amman, the Jordanian capital, to see Khalilzad in January. ...
Feelers had been put out to Iraqi insurgents before but not at such a high level. "The Americans had been flirting with such meetings for a while, but they needed to sit down with people who carried more weight in the insurgency," said one leader of the National Islamic Resistance, an umbrella organisation representing some of the main insurgent groups.
The trio of Iraqi negotiators claimed to represent three-quarters of the "resistance". It included Ansar al- Sunnah, the group responsible for a suicide bombing that killed 22 in a US army canteen in Mosul in December 2004, and also the 1920 Revolution Brigade, which has carried out many kidnappings and claimed to have shot down a British Hercules aircraft near Tikrit in January 2005, in which 10 people died. ...
The talks continued in Baghdad for about eight weeks, sometimes on consecutive days at Allawi's home. ...
The atmosphere eventually soured at a meeting said to have been attended by Khalilzad and six US generals as well as tribal leaders from Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala and other hotspots. Each side apparently accused the other of stepping up attacks during the supposed period of grace and the insurgents refused to have lunch with the generals on the grounds that they were military occupiers. ...
The final blow to the negotiations came in mid-March when Khalilzad said that he would be willing to talk to Iran about resolving the conflict in Iraq. The news came as a bombshell to the Sunni insurgents, who complained to the ambassador at their final meeting.
Shortly afterwards the government of Nouri al-Maliki was formed with the support of pro-Iranian elements. The Sunni insurgents responded by sending a memo to Khalilzad — now tipped to become US ambassador to the United Nations — suspending all meetings and accusing the Americans of "dishonesty".
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