1115.org

Everybody knows that if you lie abroad for the sake of your country, that makes you a diplomat. But if you’re Nouri al-Maliki, and you lie abroad for the sake of George Bush (who invaded your country and is responsible for the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) and John McCain (who has trouble keeping Afghanistan and Iraq straight in his head, and who — no matter what he hopes — will come to be remembered as the doddering old man who tried in vain to lie and flip-flop and free-barbecue his way to the presidency), then what does that make you?

Maliki, you will remember, on the eve of Obama’s arrival in Iraq, undiplomatically endorsed Obama’s Iraq policy at the expense of Bush-McCain’s.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
[…]
“The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t,” Maliki told Der Spiegel.

Much arm-twisting later, a Maliki aide came up with a half-hearted denial (which was improbably released by released by U.S. Central Command on the Iraqi government’s behalf):

The statement by an aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki calling his remarks in Der Spiegel “misinterpreted and mistranslated” followed a call to the prime minister’s office from U.S. government officials in Iraq.
[…]
But 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.

Later in the day, a Maliki aide released a statement saying the remarks had been misinterpreted, though without citing specific comments.

Nobody was fooled (but a lie that nobody buys is still a lie):

A number of media outlets likewise professed to being confused by the statement from Maliki’s office. The New York Times pointed out that al-Dabbagh’s statement “did not address a specific error.” CBS likewise expressed disbelief pointing out that Maliki mentions a timeframe for withdrawal three times in the interview and then asks, “how likely is it that SPIEGEL mistranslated three separate comments? Matthew Yglesias, a blogger for the Atlantic Monthly, was astonished by “how little effort was made” to make the Baghdad denial convincing. And the influential blog IraqSlogger also pointed out the lack of specifics in the government statement.

And now we learn that “Maliki actually got a copy of the interview before it was printed and had the option to make any changes.”

The reason (Der Spiegel) scores so many high level interviews is that the editors agree to allow the subjects to “authorize” the interviews before they go to press. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, in other words: Maliki not only endorsed Obama’s plans for withdrawing from Iraq, but his office then explicitly approved the endorsement before it was printed. The denials, then, were doubly facetious. Spiegel couldn’t say so, though, without revealing its embarrassing authorization policy.

So much for “misinterpreted and mistranslated”!