This did not work, because I was not the issue. Nor would I give in to crass intimidation. The issue was whether the leader of the loyal opposition in the US had tried to interfere with a process of negotiations with a foreign power.

So, a third tactic was deployed. This consisted of denying what I in fact did not say, and then claiming that I was wrong or ill-intentioned.

First, the senator denied that he had opposed "redeployment and drawdown of troops", something I had not suggested that he had. Then, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, an anti-Bush Republican, denied something else that I had not said. Assuming a suitable air of indignation, the venerable senator asserted that Obama had not called for a delay in the negotiations during his July meeting in Baghdad with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The problem is that I never suggested that he had done so at that meeting - at which Hagel and a dozen other people were also present.

In my original article in the New York Post, I quoted Obama and the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on the record. Since then, of course, lots of other material has emerged on the subject. In September, the London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat published a long interview with Zebari, reporting Obama's attempts at persuading the Iraqi officials to postpone an agreement with the US. However, unbeknown to me, the matter had been in the public domain even before that. This is how The New York Times reported Obama's conversation with Zebari on 16 June 2008: "While the Bush administration would like to see an agreement reached before the summer political conventions, Mr Obama said today he opposed such a timetable. [He said] ‘My concern is that the Bush administration, in a weakened state politically, ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some way might be binding on the next administration, whether it's my administration or Senator McCain's administration...'." (Did the senator not know that an agreement reached by a US administration with a foreign power is binding on its successor?)