JIDDAH (The Washington Post) -- Saudi Arabia announced Wednesday that it has begun talks with Iraq about opening an embassy.

The Sunni-led kingdom has long resisted a formal step that would bolster the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and signal to Iraq's minority Sunnis that their prospects of returning to power are over.
After talks with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal also said the kingdom was prepared to seriously consider participating in the international meeting President Bush announced last month to push for Arab-Israeli peace.
Saudi participation is widely considered essential for any U.S.-orchestrated meeting to be considered legitimate in the Arab world, since Saudi Arabia is the author of the Arab League peace initiative as well as the guardian of the Islamic world.
“We are interested in a peace conference that deals with substantive matters of peace, issues of real substance, not non-substantive issues,” Saud said. “If that does so, that becomes of great interest to Saudi Arabia. . . . We would look very closely and very hard at attending.”
After listening to Rice's explanation of U.S. expectations for Bush's initiative, Saud said the kingdom sees “several positive solutions for a sustainable Palestinian state, dismantling
[Jewish] settlements and solving the problems of Palestinian refugees.”
But the conditional Saudi acceptance also will force the U.S. officials to ensure that the meeting is more than what Saud called a “photo opportunity.” The Arab world has been highly skeptical of the Bush administration's commitment, given repeated pledges to jumpstart the moribund peace process, and its energy with only 18 months left in office.
Rice and Gates are on an unprecedented joint trip to the region this week to encourage a broad and long-term approach to stability in the Middle East, discussing potential sales of arms, and how to get Palestinian-Israeli peace talks back on track after the dissolution of the Hamas government. They specifically urged eight Arab governments to do more to end the political and military tensions between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites.
The Saudi announcement about opening an embassy is a major political step, after resisting U.S. pressure for both political and security reasons for four years -- as have most Arab states. Only Jordan maintains an embassy in Iraq, while Egypt has a diplomatic mission but no diplomats in Baghdad after its ambassador was murdered.
U.S. officials hope that other Sunni Arab governments will follow the Saudi example after the kingdom sends a mission to Iraq to explore the possibility of opening an embassy. The Saudi diplomacy follows the mid-July visit of Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie to the kingdom to discuss security issues.
A senior State Department official acknowledged that serious differences remain between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
“They have real concerns about the Maliki government and they haven't seen change,” a senior State Department official traveling with Rice told reporters on her plane. He said he expects the kingdom to send a delegation to Baghdad to discuss an embassy soon, noting that the Saudis would be major targets in Iraq in light of the sectarian divide.
But the underlying tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia were still evident during the Rice-Gates visit, as the Saudi foreign minister expressed anger at recent public criticism from Washington's UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad that the oil-rich kingdom was not doing enough to help with reconciliation in Iraq