A Diplomat Who Loves The Really Tough Jobs

He now appears headed to Baghdad as part of a personnel sweep that is bringing a whole new set of faces to the top of diplomatic and military jobs as part of President Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq.

For Crocker, an Air Force officer's son who attended schools in Morocco, Turkey and Canada, it's coming full circle.

He first went to Baghdad as a young economic officer, a year before Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979. Baghdad had broken off relations with Washington, so the United States had an interest section. U.S. diplomats were under 24-hour surveillance and banned from leaving Baghdad without government permission.

"It was very difficult to make contact with Iraqis, as it was so dangerous for them," says Jones, who was posted in Baghdad as political officer. "Saddam executed most of his first cabinet, so we already knew what a difficult person we were dealing with. . . . Ryan was the best at triangulating the situation and figuring out what was happening."

Iraq then invaded Iran in 1980, setting off the bloodiest and longest modern Middle East war. Crocker and Jones had to evacuate Americans, but stay themselves.

Crocker met and married his wife, Christine, a foreign service secretary, in Baghdad. The two have been inseparable ever since, colleagues say.

Almost a quarter-century later, Crocker was one of the most significant voices inside the administration about the dangers of invading Iraq.

In late 2002, as the Bush administration prepared for war, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tasked Crocker and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns with exploring the risks of military intervention. The result was a six-page memo they entitled "The Perfect Storm," according to an account in Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung's biography "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell."

The memo bluntly predicted that toppling Hussein could unleash long-repressed sectarian and ethnic tensions, that the Sunni minority would not easily relinquish power, and that powerful neighbors such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would try to move in to influence events. It also cautioned that the United States would have to start from scratch building a political and economic system because Iraq's infrastructure was in tatters.

Crocker returned to Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion to help during the transition and the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority. He left that July, a time when he and colleagues could still drive to farewell meetings in the capital in unarmored vans.

The night before he left, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who is now Iraq's president, threw a large and raucous party for Crocker, who told colleagues in frustration that he was returning to Washington to teach at National Defense University for a year and then retire.

"He has often been critical of policies he has been charged with implementing and had little success in persuading the political leadership to change," says a former colleague who requested anonymity in light of the new appointment.