KUWAIT CITY — Iraq’s top diplomat made an unusual personal appeal Monday to mostly Sunni Arab neighbors nervous about the influence and intentions of Shiite Iran. His message was blunt: Iraq is no Iranian puppet and Arab states should make good on old promises to help Iraq.
The session came at the invitation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the Bush administration pushed twin aims to strengthen Iraq and head off any Iranian ambition to expand its reach.
“When we first started this meeting today, we had questions of the ambiguity of the picture in Iraq, the political picture,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Hamad bin-Khalifa, told reporters. “The secretary of state and our brother Hoshyar Zebari gave us very good explanations.”
Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, won no specific pledge for the diplomatic prize Iraq most seeks — Arab embassies and ambassadors posted to Baghdad or Sunni Arab heads of state paying calls on Iraq’s Shiite prime minister. There were no new promises for relief of Iraq’s billions in Saddam Hussein-era debt.
The Bush administration has tried for years to rally Arab support for a post-Hussein Iraq, both for the boost that regional acceptance would give the fledgling democracy and as a hedge against Iran.
