Kurdistan's man in Washington By Laura Rozen

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Qubad Talabani is one of those cultural anomalies who somehow seem like natural creatures of Washington. Few twenty-nine-year-olds are trusted to serve as the top envoy of a foreign entity to the United States, as Talabani—the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani—is by Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. But Talabani—slim, goateed, English-accented, a onetime Italian-car mechanic with an American wife—handles his duties with aplomb, rushing around town in subtle suits to meet with policy makers and power brokers. His most distinctive attribute may be that he represents perhaps the sole triumph to emerge from postwar Iraq: a relatively peaceful region free of foreign troops, eager for American protection and open for business.

On a sunny April afternoon, I meet Talabani at the KRG’s simple second-floor I Street offices, two blocks from the White House. Inside, the plain white walls are adorned with Ottoman-style silver filigreed decorations, colorful woven saddlebags, and Kurdish paintings. On a side table in the foyer sits a photograph of Talabani père with President Bush in the Oval Office.

As the photograph suggests, the Kurds currently find their interests closely aligned with those of the Bush administration. They want American troops to stay in Iraq and fear that any near-term drawdown would trigger greater instability. These days, Talabani is having little trouble selling a simple message around town: “Kurdistan is a success story,” he explains to me. “Kurdistan is stable, prosperous, economically viable ... We’ve built a strong civil society in the heart of the Islamic Middle East, surrounded by tough neighbors.” He adds—and here comes the pitch: “But we can’t succeed without the support of the world’s only superpower.”

Talabani is hardly the first cosmopolitan, culturally dexterous representative of a foreign interest to find his cause in vogue in the halls of American government. The Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi was also a charismatic, effective Washington advocate, who systematically persuaded influential constituencies, and ultimately the Bush administration, to lend the U.S. Army to his longtime struggle against Saddam Hussein. But Qubad is different. He’s of a younger generation, more pragmatic than idealistic, less enmeshed in neoconservative Republican politics and with less of the seductive con-man qualities of the old master. “We have friends on the Democratic and Republican sides,” Talabani says. “It is not our game to play American politics. Chalabi did that and failed. We are not taking sides.”


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