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.