Khalilizad to talk to Iranians?

The Washington Post's David Ignatius has an upbeat article in today's WaPo about the various negotiations among the Sunni Arab, Kurdish, and Shi'ite Arab party leaders. As is normal with bloggers, good news is frequently ignored by the agitprop left and sometimes overlooked by the conservative right, in this case because an intriguing sentence quoting Ambassador Khalilizad hints at talks with the Iranians, with himself presumably as a participant.

After Ignatius describes the progress of the parliamentary groups so far---unity government, national security commission, no red lines---he describes a conversation with the Ambassador over Iran:

One seeming obstacle to unity has been fear about the role of Iran. To finesse that issue, Hakim said he is urging Iran to talk with the United States about Iraq's political future. Khalilzad himself has been quietly exploring what he calls the "modalities" for such U.S.-Iran talks on Iraq.

Exploring the "modalities" means in dip-talk getting permission of Condi and GWB to proceed.

Given recent talk about the so-called "moderate clerics" in Iran being dissatisfied with the gung-ho populist President, these possible discussions could be avenues to other areas.

Another interesting aspect is that Khalilizad is fluent in Arabic and Dari, the national language of Afghanistan. Dari is a dialect of Persian Iranian Farsi, which means that the US has an ambassador capable of understanding the language, and perhaps the nuances, of an official interlocutor from the Iranian government.

I hope GWB and Condi allow Khalilizad to go down this road for the first steps toward a dialogue.