At a time when many soldiers paced around Europe in tanks, John Abizaid first made a name for himself in the Army by ordering his troops to hot-wire bulldozers into makeshift tanks in Grenada and fighting to establish a no-fly zone to protect Iraq’s Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War.

“He wasn’t in the big tank-on-tank engagements in the first Gulf War,” said David Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general who served with Abizaid in Grenada and later in Afghanistan when Abizaid was the US Central Command chief. “He didn’t serve in the big mechanized or armored units. He was in the other part of the Army.”

Now, Abizaid, a Lebanese-American Arabic speaker who commanded US forces in the Middle East from 2003 to 2007 and once championed overture with Iran, faces another difficult assignment after President Donald Trump tapped the retired general on Tuesday to serve as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The United States wants Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to get to the bottom of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death and wrap up the Saudi-led air war in Yemen, while using Riyadh as the centerpiece of a military alliance to check Iran.