Regarding Tim's post below, the New York Times politics blog has a couple of updates on the story including a partial retraction from a spokesman for Mr Maliki.
It now seems that his comments had been “as not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq,” although the language of the statement is so convoluted that it is difficult to see exactly what the Iraqi PM is actually objecting to, or trying to say.
There are only two possibilities here: either Maliki is 'doing an Obama' and beginning a rowback over controversial comments (Obama recently retreated from his statement that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided" which suggested he favoured the One Jerusalem campaign) ,or he truly believes in the Obama plan and is being forced into a diplomatic retraction under pressure from the Bush administration. The obfuscation of his latest statement suggests the latter. Certainly, he has been keen to push President Bush into specifying a withdrawal timetable of sorts in the recent negotiations over a new US-Iraq security agreement, which led to Friday's US declaration of a 'time horizon' for withdrawal.
If no further clarification comes, expect the Democrats to play this over and over again. McCain's only hope will be to stress, as the NYT blog makes clear, that no formal withdrawal request has yet been received from the Iraqis.
