the week the wheels came off?
New York Daily News - November 30, 2006
ANALYSIS Maliki dinner-date snub rubs salt in Prez wounds
BY THOMAS DeFRANK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
WASHINGTON - There was a time when American clients wouldn’t dare
snub a President of the United States. But these are hardly normal
times - not for Iraq, nor a seriously weakened President.
White House spinners tried to confect a benign explanation for
yesterday’s cancellation of a dinner date between President Bush and
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But even though their high-
stakes meeting today will apparently go ahead as scheduled, the
dinner no-show was an undeniable embarrassment for Bush.
“You never postpone something like this at the last minute unless
somebody’s ripped,” said a former top Bush aide, “and it’s probably
Maliki.”
He could hardly be blamed after the blockbuster leak of a classified
White House memorandum that amounts to a rousing no-confidence
declaration by the Bush government.
The dispassionate memo by national security adviser Stephen Hadley
suggests that Maliki is either a knave or a hapless lightweight.
Ironically, Hadley also undermines his boss’s credibility; his sober
realism throughout the memo starkly diverges from much of Bush’s
glass half-full Iraq rhetoric.
Both leaders confront enormous pressure on the home front. Maliki
can’t look like an American toady, especially since Shiite cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr, who has already denounced the Bush meeting, can
bring down the government at his whim.
Like Maliki, Bush is also scrambling to reestablish his relevance
after an election that sharply diminished his power just as Iraq has
degenerated into a full-bore crisis.
“Depending on what happens next,” said a gloomy Republican political
operative, “this could be viewed as the week the wheels came off.”
The embarrassing memo has triggered a wave of conspiracy theories.
Some Bushies speculate the Hadley leak was a premeditated ploy to
stiffen Maliki’s spine that backfired horribly. Others wonder whether
someone in Vice President Cheney’s shop or at the Pentagon, angry at
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ouster, was playing payback.
Whatever the reality, “These are the kind of things that don’t happen
when you’re riding high,” a senior Bush counselor moaned.