Baghdad
As Vice President Dick Cheney chatted with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki before their meeting last week, David Addington sat unobtrusively in a gold-trimmed chair near the back of the room. Unobtrusiveness isn't easy for him to do. At about 6′4,″ the vice president's chief of staff cuts an imposing figure, but in public Addington somehow manages to keep a low profile. The seats were arranged in a horseshoe, with the two principals at the bottom and their respective staffs facing each other.

We were in a grand room in the building that houses Maliki's office--an opulent structure that Saddam built in the 1990s as a home away from home for the Arab leaders whose support he sought to end the U.N. sanctions against his country. Between Addington and his boss sat several lower-ranking Cheney staffers, and, by rank, he should have chosen a seat much closer to his boss. But Addington believes, as Cheney did when he served in the Ford White House, that a staff man should be anonymous. So he shuns the spotlight and avoids journalists unless, as in this case, he cannot help it.

The small press pool traveling with Cheney had been told we would be let into the room for a brief photo op--the smile-and-make-small-talk moment before an important bilateral meeting. The Iraqi press corps was being held at the door while we walked in. Cheney, a natural low-talker, was still speaking, and his voice trailed off. "The president sends his personal .  .  ."

No one could make out what he said--a problem for the wire reporters who use such statements to give currency to their stories. (Later we played fill-in-the-blank. His personal .  .  . greetings? His personal .  .  . trainer? His personal .  .  . hygiene?)

A short time later there was a noise at the back of the room. The guard blocking the door to keep the Iraqis from entering had moved aside and the crush was on. Some 15 cameramen, with cameras held high above their heads, were trying to squeeze through the narrow doorway at precisely the same time, with the Iraqi reporters pushing from behind. This mass of humanity got stuck momentarily, then burst through the opening as if propelled from a slingshot. They were still struggling for position, and making a quiet commotion, as they neared the delegation.

Two of the Iraqi cameramen had a particularly intense shoving match underway, and when the larger one finally tired of the smaller one knocking into his arm, he gave the little guy a forceful shove that knocked him off-balance and sent him into the loving arms of David Addington. The larger cameraman then lost his balance, and, for just a moment, he and his colleague were both sitting in the lap of Cheney's much-feared chief of staff. Addington looked something like an underfed offseason shopping-mall Santa. He shook his head, chuckled, and gave a shrug of his large shoulders.

Cheney must have had a similar feeling often in his two days of meetings with Iraqi leaders, with political problems landing unexpectedly in his lap. He arrived in Baghdad planning to spend most of his time laying the groundwork for the next phase of the long-term strategic relationship between the United States and Iraq. But the Iraqis have yet to meet several of the benchmarks set by Congress last fall. Their apparent lack of urgency prompted General David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to offer rare public criticism of Iraqi leaders last week. In an interview with the Washington Post, Petraeus said that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation."