Report: Ryan Clark Crocker to be new Ambasador to Iraq

Ryan Clark Crocker is currently Ambassador to Pakistan, where he greeted Condaleeza Rice on a March 2006 trip.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 — When Ryan C. Crocker was trying to improve his Arabic in the late 1970s, he traveled to Jordan, made contact with a desert tribe and settled in for some hands-on training a little different from the standard State Department regimen.

“He wound up being a shepherd for a week or two, chasing down stray sheep and living with the Bedouin,” said Frederic C. Hof, a retired Army officer and author on the Middle East who recalls reading Mr. Crocker’s official report on the trip when they were in language training.

Mr. Crocker, President Bush’s choice as the new ambassador to Iraq, has brought the same intensity to his three-decade diplomatic career, amassing a record of Middle East and South Asia experience possibly unrivaled in the United States Foreign Service.

He has served as ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria and, since 2004, Pakistan. He reopened the American Embassy in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. And he knows Iraq well; he worked there in the 1970s, led the State Department’s Iraq-Kuwait task force during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and returned to Baghdad for four months after the 2003 invasion as director of governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

In confronting Iraq’s sectarian mayhem and the baffling mix of religious, political and tribal interests, he will be able to draw on many years of immersion in trouble spots with similar problems, including Beirut, where he survived the embassy bombing in 1983.

Read the rest at the NY Times

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