A Rose by any Other Name
21st July 2008
So much of diplomacy is a game of finding the right words that are acceptable to both sides who might not completely agree. This process sometimes goes astray.
Recently, the Bush administration was trying to find a compromise between their position of never setting a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and the Iraqi demand for just such a time table. This has been a major sticking point (not the only one) in the drafting of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq to replace the expiring UN mandate for the US presence in Iraq. The Bush administration has been pressing hard for a SOFA by the end of July. The Iraqis have been understanably reluctant to sign any long term agreement with an administration that will be gone in a few months.
Some genius in our state department finally came up with a phrase that was apparently acceptable to both sides, the now famous “time horizon for aspirational goals”. Isn’t that a great bit of polysyllabic garbage! I guess the intent was to craft a linguistuc Rorschach test that would be seen differently by different people. For a day or two, it seemed that the Bush people and the Iraqis were on the same page (even though it was not clear which page that was) but then came the al Malaki interview in the German paper, Der Spiegel.
Al Malaki remarked that he thought that the Obama proposal for a US withdrawal in 16 months was in the right range. He was then careful to say that he did not mean to endorse Obama as a presidential candidate. The next day, the Iraqis released a statement that al Malaki had been mistranslated and misunderstood. The problem with that is that al Malaki’s own translator provided Der Spiegel with the translation. Then the US said that there was not going to be a firm date for withdrawal and that conditions on the ground would determine when we withdrew. In other words, the same position that Bush has always taken. Following that, a senior Iraqi official stated that a firm date was important to the Iraqis. So much for the magic of the State department wordsmith.