10:00 pm
If This Is A Retraction…
…then I’m the principal dancer for the Kirov Ballet. And you don’t want me to be that, trust me.
Today, the spokesperson for Iraqi Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki issued a kinda-sorta-well-maybe-not-really retraction regarding Maliki’s statement to Der Spiegel yesterday that he has a crush on Obama supports Obama’s 16-month timetable for withdrawal. Here’s Der Spiegel’s report on the walkback:
A Baghdad government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a statement that SPIEGEL had “misunderstood and mistranslated” the Iraqi prime minister, but didn’t point to where the misunderstanding or mistranslation might have occurred. Al-Dabbagh said Maliki’s comments “should not be understood as support to any US presidential candidates.” The statement was sent out by the press desk of the US-led Multinational Force in Iraq. [Emphasis added.]
And then, a little later today, we learned how the statement came about:
After the Spiegel interview was published and began generating headlines Saturday, officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad contacted Maliki’s office to express concern and seek clarification on the remarks, according to White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.
Riiiiight. No pressure there. Maliki was spontaneously outraged that his remarks had been taken out of context. And I will be performing at the Bolshoi in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet next week (as Juliet, of course).
So what are we to make of all this?
Pretend for a moment that you are the prime minister of a country that has another country’s troops occupying it visiting it. Now imagine that, on the eve of a visit by that other country’s opposition candidate for President, you decide to express support for the opposition candidate’s plan to have his country’s troops go home.
You’re feeling good about yourself. But then you get The Call. Uh-oh. The other country’s sitting government isn’t happy with you. They want you to walk the statement back because, well, it basically took both the sitting President and his preferred successor and cut them off at the knees.
So what do you do? You want to pacify your allies, but you also don’t want to take back what you said: you really do want the occupiers visitors to go home already. So you try to walk a line. You have your spokesperson issue a “clarification.” Except the clarification doesn’t clarify anything. Instead, it muddies the waters further by never actually denying anything you said. In fact, the only thing it states unequivocally is that you aren’t supporting any one candidate in the other country’s Presidential election — which was the one thing you didn’t have to clarify, given that you had made that crystal clear in the original interview.
Oh, and just to make sure everyone understands exactly where you’re coming from, you allow the statement to be issued not by your office, but by the public relations department of the troops occupying visiting your country.
I’m beginning to think this Maliki guy is a lot smarter than we thought.
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