BAGHDAD — When Jalal Talabani was sworn in to Saddam Hussein's old job last April, the veteran Kurdish leader defined himself as a father figure who would use the presidency to bridge Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divides and conduct its foreign affairs as a traveling head of state.
Since then, his aides say, the 72-year-old interim president has often felt upstaged, slighted or ignored by the Shiite Muslim interim prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, a younger man with less political experience but more formal power in Iraq's parliamentary system -- and a tendency to monopolize it.
Friction between the two boiled over late last month, adding an intensely personal feud to Iraq's caldron of troubles. When Jafari, 59, made a foreign trip without informing Talabani, "the president went berserk," said a person close to him, hastening an open break with the prime minister that has paralyzed efforts to form a new government.
On Friday, the stalemate prompted U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, alarmed by the worst sectarian violence of the post-Hussein era, to propose that the country's leaders gather abroad for a round-the-clock retreat until they settle their differences. Khalilzad, who was speaking on Al Sharqiya TV, has been trying since Iraq's Dec. 15 parliamentary elections to broker the formation of an inclusive coalition government.
The immediate problem is that Jafari has won his Shiite bloc's nomination to serve a full term as prime minister in the new government. But Sunni Arab political leaders, as well as Talabani and his Kurdish followers, oppose his selection.
The Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular parties agreed Thursday to put off a showdown by scheduling parliament's inaugural session for March 19 -- a week past the constitutional deadline -- despite warnings by Khalilzad that any delay raised the risk of civil war.
"For much of our history, Iraq has been ruled by one strongman or another," said Mithal Alusi, an independent Sunni Arab lawmaker. "Now we have a democracy and a constitution that divides power. We're having a lot of difficulty learning how to do that."
Iraq's problems are far more complex and intractable than the rift between the top two leaders. But their personalities and differences offer glimpses of the ground-level bickering that has helped fragment Iraq, enabling insurgent and sectarian violence to flourish after U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein in 2003.
