Al-Maliki’s Support for Timetables Continues?
July 21st, 2008 by Sarah
Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki has told a German magazine Der Spiegel that he supports a 16-month proposal for withdrawal of U.S. troops. “That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” Although Maliki did not explicitly say that he supported Barack Obama over John McCain, he did state that “whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.”
Later, al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali Dabbagh held that Der Spiegel misinterpreted al-Maliki’s statement, while the magazine continues to stands by its original article.
John Marshall at Talking Points Memo, Virginia Dem at Daily Kos, Matthew Yglesias, and Juan Cole at Informed Comment all noted that while most have cited Ali Dabbagh as Maliki’s spokesman, he “actually seems to work for the CENTCOM, or Pentagon Middle East command.”
Juan Cole went further to suggest that “when the original demand came from al-Maliki for a timetable for US withdrawal, it was al-Dabbagh who reinterpreted it as a ‘time horizon.’ Al-Dabbagh was contradicted by National Security Counsellor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, who seems actually closer in this thinking to al-Maliki. My guess is that al-Dabbagh has been recruited by some agency in Washington, DC, to explain away al-Maliki’s statements whenever they contradict Bush’s.”
Posted in Iraq, Military |
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July 21st, 2008 at 1:13 pm
[…] agrees with Ezra Klein at the American Prospect that “fundamentally, Maliki’s comment [in Der Spiegel magazine] is evidence of what the Iraqi government sees as the primary impediment to their government […]