Diplomacy: Has the Dealmaker Lost His Touch? For a time, Zalmay Khalilzad was America's indispensable man in Iraq. Caught up in factional politicking, he may now be less so.

Byline: Scott Johnson (With Michael Hastings in New York)

Once again, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is basking in the limelight of another deal done. He arrived in Baghdad with all the glad-handing style of a politician on the campaign trail and has been a diplomatic whirlwind ever since. An Afghan-American Sunni Muslim, Khalilzad has drawn on his deep knowledge of the region and forceful personality to break political logjams on an impressive array of fronts. In little more than six months he has overseen a successful referendum, an election and the drafting of a constitution, and now, it seems, has put an end to the long political stalemate over who would be Iraq's next prime minister--with the right to form the country's first bona fide new government.

The breakthrough came abruptly when the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance tapped Jawad al-Maliki as its new prime ministerial candidate, after the unpopular incumbent Ibrahim Jaafari agree to step aside. Sunni and Kurdish parties had bitterly opposed Jaafari, accusing him of sectarian bias. Though a close Jaafari ally, who recently headed a committee that purged Sunni loyalists from top government posts, Maliki appears to be acceptable to all Iraqi factions. For Khalilzad, it was a personal triumph culminating months of daily meetings with top Iraqi leaders and near-constant convoying in and out of the Green Zone. Yet he may have paid a high price. By so immersing himself in the factional politicking involved in getting to this moment, he may have undermined his future effectiveness.

A sign of this potential trouble was last week's deal itself. For all Khalilzad's aggressive ground-work, it appears to have been clinched not by him but by the United Nations envoy Ashraf Qazi. Meanwhile, the American pleni-potentiary finds himself increasingly sniped at from all sides. The charge, however undeserved, is essentially that he's taken sides in Iraq's tribal conflicts. Indeed, the very qualities that have served him thus far--his ethnic background and regional expertise--may be turning into a liability. "The Shia think he's a Sunni," says Vali Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival," summing up the problem. "Some refer to him as a professional Sunni."

These doubts began to take root in the days after last January's elections, when the details of an American "Sunni outreach" program emerged. By meeting in face-to-face discussions with Sunni leaders, Khalilzad hoped to draw them toward the political mainstream and away from violence. To appear evenhanded in a country with a massive Shia majority, he went out of his way to ...