Aside from some joking about press leaks, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Miniter Nouri al-Maliki met Thursday without mentioning a leaked White House memo critical of Maliki.
Nor was there any mention of the canceled meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, just hours after disclosure of the scathing memo, which was written by Bush’s national security adviser.
“There’s no cloud over the meeting in any fashion whatsoever,” insisted a senior administration official who was present for Thursday’s talks.
The official acknowledged “there was not a lot of warm-up to these meetings,” but he tried to frame that as a positive development.
“That’s one of the things that the president really appreciates,” the official enthused. “Maliki is someone who really wants to get down to business.”
For his part, Maliki shrugged off the dustup over Wednesday’s canceled meeting, which was supposed to include him, Bush and Jordanian King Abdullah.
“There was not part of our agenda — a trilateral meeting — so there is no problem,” Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with Bush.
But it was on the schedule of the president, who made special arrangements to fly from the NATO summit in Latvia to a trilateral meeting with Maliki and Abdullah in Jordan late Wednesday. Bush learned of the cancellation through a phone call to Air Force One.
White House officials insisted Maliki was not snubbing Bush in retaliation for the memo, which was written by national security adviser Steve Hadley. The Bush adviser wrote that Maliki is disingenuous, incompetent or “ignorant.”
Maliki chose not to fling those words back in Bush’s face when they finally met on Thursday, perhaps because the prime minister had already made his displeasure known by canceling Wednesday’s meeting.
“There were a few jokes about leaking things to the press, which I can only assume were lighthearted references to the memo,” said the official who participated in the Bush-Maliki meeting. “There was no explicit reference to it or discussion of it.”
Indeed, the president seemed to go out of his way to counter Hadley’s description of Maliki as a feckless leader, unable to counter the burgeoning sectarian violence in Iraq.
“He’s the right guy for Iraq,” Bush insisted. “And we’re going to help him.”
