The Iraq rape case has turned into the strangest “he said, she said” imaginable. The “she” is the accuser, the “he” is Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And we? With the smoking gun in our hands, we’re sitting there with mouth wide shut, letting the situation escalate into a major political firestorm around us.

Here are the overnight developments:

Moving to quash disquiet … Nouri Maliki … released a copy of a US medical report saying no rape had taken place.
[…]
The document … is a “theatre trauma nursing record” from Ibn Sina Hospital, located in Baghdad’s international Green Zone and run by the US military.

The handwritten report says “no vaginal lacerations or obvious injuries” in English and Arabic.
[…]
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that a nurse, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she had treated the woman at a clinic in her neighbourhood of Amil and had seen signs of sexual and physical assault.

US military officials have neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the document. They added that they did not know how confidential medical records had ended up at the prime minister’s offices.

Why are we still sitting on the truth, making no official statement either way? Either way you look at it, it comes out incomprehensible.

If the document released by Maliki is authentic, and the medical examination rules out rape, surely the situation would be substantially defused if we stood up and certified that? Granted there will continue to be angry mutterings by Sunnis about a cover-up by the U.S. military, but we do presumably still have some credibility left at this point. Certifying there was no rape can only help the situation, it can’t hurt.

If the document released by Maliki is false, certainly standing up and certifying that will make the current firestorm look like an insipid warm-up act. But how can we tell ourselves we have any other choice? At a purely practical level — leaving ethics and morality to one side — how long can we expect to keep this truth under wraps? And if it’s going to come out anyway, isn’t it always best to put it out right away instead of playing stupid games?

And at the moral/ethical level, is this what we have now reduced ourselves to in Iraq, that we acquiesce in covering-up rape cover-ups perpetrated by our alleged puppets? If Maliki can force us to aid and abet him in covering up the rape just by fabricating a document (and presumably telling us: “If you don’t back me, my government falls, and for Bush that’s a fate worse than impeachment”), then who’s the puppet and who’s pulling the strings? Much more to the point, what will we acquiesce in next?

Surely there’s one lesson Agatha Christie etched so deeply into all our minds that no one can have any doubt there is only one sensible thing to do in such a situation: if you give in to a blackmailer once, the end result is always catastrophic ruin?