As of 9 pm Saturday night, the nation's major newspapers are weirdly reticent about Prime Minister al-Maliki's striking (make that extremely striking and indeed extraordinary) statement to Germany's Der Spiegel that a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq makes sense: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." According to this major magazine, "In his conversation with SPIEGEL, he was once again candid about his frustration over the Bush administration's hesitancy about agreeing to a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops."

At this writing, CNN has acknowledged that Maliki said he agreed with Obama, though noting also that "a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks 'were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately.'" Uh-huh. We await Der Spiegel's release of the transcript, and the particulars that Maliki's spokesman rejects.

But the news cascades, or rather the absence of news does. At 9:08 pm, the NYT has yet to acknowledge the Maliki statement in anything more than a sidebar online piece to the effect that the White House mistakenly sent out the word in an e-mail blast to reports. So, according to the NYT, this is a story of a White House gaffe, not a story about how the most legitimate political authority in Iraq sides against the Bush administration and its would-be successor, John McCain.

The WP carries Garance Franke-Ruta's blog mention of Maliki's support of Obama's position, but so far, that's all. We await the morning paper.

Update 9 AM: Await no more. Both the NYT and the WP shoehorned the Maliki report into their p. 1 pieces on Obama in Afghanistan. Garance Franke-Ruta reported it on her valuable WP blog, "The Trail." The LAT not only fronted the Maliki Spiegel interview but gave it the headline.

Ezra Klein alerts us that Gershom Gorenberg, whose blog at Southjerusalem.com is indispensable on the Region That Will Not Go Away, posts this striking follow-up to Obama's most troubling, potentially most consequential pander to date, what certainly sounded like an over-the-top more-Promised-Land-Than-Moses declaration to AIPAC last month that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." Gorenberg:

When I criticized that statement, an Obama adviser quickly emailed to tell me the candidate really meant physically undivided: No fences. Political arrangements were a different matter. Obama, he said,

has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel's capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.

Read more »

From today's WP:

Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's top foreign policy aide, noted that Biden championed the idea of dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions: Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish. "If we had followed Senator Biden's ill-informed advice to split Iraq into three pieces, we would have seen wide-scale civil war," he said.

Well! In that case, looks like we--and the Iraqis--certainly dodged a bullet.