Rice was quickly given a taste of life in the war torn Iraqi capital, as her C-130 military transport plane was forced to circle for 45 minutes over an airport temporarily closed by insurgent rocket attacks, her spokesman said.
The stakes facing her own government and people were also dramatically underlined by the announcement that six more US soldiers had been killed in Iraq, bringing to 16 the number of American personnel killed this week.
The US envoy met with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki, who is desperately trying to hold together a national unity coalition of bitterly divided parties representing many of the country's warring factions.
"I do think he has the strength. I think he's a very good and strong prime minister," Rice told reporters on her plane, praising Maliki's steps to purge his security forces of rogue elements supporting sectarian death squads. "The government and Prime Minister Maliki believe very strongly that their most important work now is to be done in getting the political bargain in place in terms of national reconciliation," she added.
Rice's visit came after Iraq's political leaders signed a solemn pledge Monday to end the sectarian bloodshed, the latest attempt by Maliki's embattled government to halt the vicious sectarian dirty war engulfing the country.
But concerns have already been expressed about how willing the Iraqi parties are to implement their promises, and violence continues, killing more than 100 Iraqis every day amid a surge in bomb attacks and death squad murders.
"Our role is to support all the parties and indeed to press all the parties to work towards that resolution promptly," Rice said. "Obviously the security situation is not one that can be tolerated and it isn't one that has been helped by political inaction," she warned.
She met briefly with Maliki at his offices in the heavily fortified Green Zone before going to the US embassy, former leader SADDAM HUSSEIN'S Republican Palace, to meet other Iraqi leaders from both sides of the sectarian divide.
Her meeting with Maliki was cut short when the Iraqi leader had to break his daylight fast, a duty of Muslims during the Ramadan festival, and Rice joined President Jalal Talabani for his own iftar, or evening feast.
"It was a quite congenial affair. They talked about all of the issues," said Rice's spokesman Sean McCormack, describing a banquet attended by Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab, and Kurdish dignitaries.
Among senior Sunni leaders, Rice met Vice-President Tarek Al Hashemi, parliamentary speaker Mahmoud Al Mashhadani, and Adnan Al Dulaimi, leader of the National Concord Front, the Sunni parliamentary bloc.
Mashhadani once accused US forces deployed in Iraq of "butchery" and last week Dulaimi was at the center of a scandal when one of his security guards was implicated in a plot to attack the Green Zone with suicide car bombers.
Nevertheless, McCormack said that Rice has detected a change in attitude. "Sunnis don't look at the US as the enemy. They look at the extremists, whether they are Iranian backed or Sunni Islamists in nature as the source of the problem here, not the US. That recognition is a positive change," he said.
Rice also met senior Shiites, including Abdel Aziz Hakim, the powerful leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was set up with Iranian sponsorship and runs an armed militia.
Following these meetings, Rice had a follow-up talk with Maliki.
"A key requirement was for Iraqis to understand that when the American people look at Iraq, they don't see the fine print of the historical relationship between different ethnic or sectarian groups," McCormack said. "What they see is Iraqis killing Iraqis. That is not a good image. The world, the American people need to see a different image," he said.
"Of all of the threats facing Iraq - the insurgency, Al Qaeda terror, sectarian violence - it is the sectarian violence that poses the strategic threat to success, so it has got to be addressed," he added. "If they want the support of the world, they have to take action."
Rice's last visit to Iraq was April 26, when she came with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to congratulate Maliki on being chosen to form a coalition government.
Since then, US troop numbers in Iraq have climbed from 132,000 to 142,000. Suicide bomb attacks are now running at all time high, bomb attacks in general at a yearly high, and civilian casualties pushing 3,000 per month.
US casualties are also mounting. Four more soldiers were killed Wednesday in Baghdad when their unit was attacked by gunfire and mortars, while two marines died in action in the mainly Sunni western province of Anbar.
Since Monday, 16 US soldiers have been killed, mostly in Baghdad, in a spike in casualties that brought the number killed since March 2003 to 2,732.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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