Khalilzad goes even further off the BushCo reservation on Iraq?

As if saying there’s a possibility of an Iraq civil war weren’t bad enough (see post immediately below) now our man Friday in Baghdad, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, supposedly is asking Iran for help calming the situation in Iraq.

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said journalists in Tehran had been shown a letter by a senior Iranian intelligence agent that was purportedly from U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, and which invited Iran to send representatives to talks in Iraq.

Please note Zalmay’s careful nondenial of the letter’s existence:

Khalilzad told CNN there had been no meetings between Iranian and U.S. officials.

However, he said nothing about whether a letter might have invited Iranian leaders to such meetings that haven’t yet taken place.

I put a question mark on the title of this post because I’m just not believing that Khalilzad did this one on his own inititative, even though this sounds like a sensible thing to do, which would theoretically rule out an initiative from BushCo inside the Beltway. The stakes just seem too high for this to be a freelance job.