The German magazine Der Speigel reported Saturday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki supported Barack Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan. This put the White House into such a panic that an aide accidentally emailed the news story to an extended media distribution list instead of an internal email list. The story — that Maliki approves of Obama's plan, not that the White House emailed the news to the world — made international headlines, but this morning, Maliki's camp seemed to have backtracked. An aide to the prime minister announced that his boss had been "misinterpreted and mistranslated," although he didn't cite any specific comments. The aide's statement might have had something to do with a little call the officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad put in to Maliki's office to "express concern and seek clarification." I'm just going to take a wild guess that Der Speigel stands firmly behind its reporting. [WP]