IRAQ: Backpedaling in Baghdad
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If evidence were needed that Iraq’s nascent government is at last ready for prime time, it seemed to come these past few days in two episodes of backpedaling by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government.
Like every U.S. administration, Maliki and his cabinet now have an echo chamber to obfuscate any thoughts they might utter with too much specificity, or inexactitude, while improvising on the world stage.
Maliki touched off the message massagers by talking to the German magazine Der Spiegel about the sensitive topic of a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals.
In a Q&A published Saturday, he also inadvertently stepped into U.S. presidential politics. The magazine quoted him endorsing the 16-month timeline for withdrawal proposed by the presumed Democratic nominee Barak Obama.
Not that it implies any behind-the-scenes pressure, but the U.S. military took the unusual step today of translating and distributing a clarification written by Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh.
It wasn’t exactly a retraction. Dabbagh blamed everything on Der Spiegel, which he said “misunderstood and misinterpreted” Maliki’s comment.
Dabbagh referred back to joint statements by Maliki and President Bush last week as the definitive — if achingly vague — word on U.S. troop withdrawals. He spoke of “horizons and timelines agreed upon in the light of the continuity of positive security developments on the ground,” as the operative trigger for withdrawal.
In addition, to silence the chattering of those who presumably misunderstood or misinterpreted Der Spiegel itself, Dabbagh denied that the prime minister had endorsed any candidate for U.S. president.
A quick look at Der Spiegel’s website would seem to make such a denial redundant.
“Maliki was careful to back away from outright support for Obama,” the magazine said, following its own words with this Maliki quote:
‘Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business.’
The Maliki kerfluffle mirrored another clarification issued a few days ago by the prime minister’s National Security adviser, Muwaffak Rubaie. He came to regret a widely quoted remark that Iraq would not accept a new security agreement with the U.S. unless it contained specific dates for U.S. troop withdrawals. Rubaie made the comment a day after Maliki addressed the same subject in more qualified terms.
Offering no explanation, Rubaie distributed an e-mail to reporters the following day.
“You can quote me saying the following,” he said. “Iraq is developing planning time horizons for the end of the requirement for U.S. combat operations in Iraq and for the presence of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq. ...’
Sound familiar?
In Iraq, the art of political word-parsing can have an especially devious appearance because literal English translation of Arabic prose often is hard to track.
The key phrase in Dabbagh’s statement, issued only in Arabic, was translated by the military this way: “the positive developments of the security situation and the
improvement witnessed in Iraqi cities makes the subject of U.S. forces’
withdrawal within prospects, horizons and timetables …”
After poring over the same line, two Los Angeles Times translators rendered it differently: “The positive developments for the security situation and the improvement Iraqi cities are witnessing makes the issue of the withdrawal of the American forces within horizons and timelines….”
The Arabic, in fact, had only two qualifiers, one of which could have been either “prospects” or “horizons.”
The military translator decided to throw both in. Whether that made the statement clearer or fuzzier is a little hard to tell.
--Alexandra Zavis and Doug Smith in Baghdad
