Squandering Those Few Shreds Of Credibility

The kerfuffle over whether Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki explicitly endorsed Barack Obama’s Iraq troop withdrawal plan will pass quickly, but it is worth noting before it does that the Bush administration just can’t help but squander what few shreds of credbility it still has left.

In case you missed it, Al-Maliki tokld Der Spiegel over the weekend that he found much to like in Obama’s position. This provoked an uproar at the White House, which already finds itself in the hugely uncomfortable position of having to grudgingly concede that American troops will have to start leaving Iraq sooner rather than later — and not whenever it damned well pleases President Bush or his handmaiden, John McCain.

The intitial response from Washington predictably was that Al-Maliki’s remarks had been mistranslated, but Der Spiegel’s audio tape in fact shows that he said in Arabic that:

Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq. . . . Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.

But all you really need to know is that the only “retraction” of the statement came not from Baghdad, but from the military press office of the occupying power.