When Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi reporter for the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, during a press conference in Baghdad, hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, he nicely wrapped up the war in Iraq for the departing president, as if he were saying: you are as contemptible as Saddam Hussein. We all remember the images broadcast around the world from Al Ferdaous Circle in Baghdad in April of 2003, when the statue of Saddam was toppled by the US Marines and a euphoric Iraqi crowd trampled it and slapped its face with shoes as it was being dragged around the place; Bush hailed it as an irrevocable sign the Iraqi people supported his invasion. Today, the Iraqi people, democratic by Bush’s standards, send an irrevocable message to Bush that they despise him. Understandable, from a society that bears gaping wounds inflicted by five years of a raging war that left thousands of its children dead, thousands more displaced because of sectarianism, and the reminder hopelessly mired in misery and shackled by fear.

After 9/11, Bush pledged to wage a war against terrorism. As a political strategy, it was a folly; a government can not wage an open war against a concept as elusive as terrorism. The governments of the European Union, which have been battling internal and international terrorism for decades, advised the American administration the issue is to be approached as a criminal act and should be left to law enforcement agencies to deal with.

Led by the testosterone over-charged Texan George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, a masculine Condoleezza Rice with balls bigger than a squirrel’s, and others, the American government’s plan of action, predictably, resembled the script of a “B” Western movie in which, subsequent to an Indian stealing a horse from a ranch, a posse gallops to the nearest Indian village kills its inhabitants, children and all, and ransacks their tepees leaving behind a landscape of burning ruins.

Bush’s attack on the Taliban was based on a grave underestimation of their combat stamina; his baseless invasion of Iraq was planned on uncorroborated intelligence that some would argue was deliberately falsified to give credence to and garner support for the operation; his ordered covert and clandestine actions in Somalia and elsewhere in the Arab world, resulted in a metastasis of terrorism that is proving to be strategically deleterious to many a government.

To the international community, Bush’s message was simple: We would like to see you as democratic, peaceful-seeking, and prosperous peoples as we are. I remember in March of 2005, as sectarian violence spiraled out of control in Iraq and the Taliban resurged with more gusto in Afghanistan, Bush stood before a military crowd at the National Defense University at Fort McNair and unusually volubly stated: “It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors. It should be clear the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance kindled in free societies … We are also determined to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

From this perspective, it is then easy to see the reason behind the boisterous drive of the Bush administration. The Taliban and the Saddam regimes were indeed radical, undemocratic, and disrespectful of their citizens and neighbors. But so are all the other Arab countries. With tacit support from the bush administration, the Arab governments straddled the war on terror like nuns on bicycles joyously riding through the cobbled streets of a provincial town; they are unbridled in their oppression against their own people much like the Bush administration felt no compunction in bolstering its executive powers and redefining democracy to allow for the effective outsourcing of tyranny. While Bush and other officials from his administration glowingly spoke of justice, their undemocratic policies and initiatives encouraged human rights abuses by precipitating the kidnapping of Moslems and Arabs from around the world, their rendering to Arab countries such as Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan to be torturously interrogated, and their detention unindicted indefinitely. The Bush administration’s chauvinism created a golden opportunity for undemocratic countries to surface their repressive methods as legitimate defense mechanisms against an opposition that allegedly threatens the established governance, even if that opposition stands in fact for a popular outcry against an unwieldy, insensitive, and unapproachable system which efficiently deflects all accountability and scrutiny from the policymakers and often absolves the unchallenged, unpopular leadership, a leadership that associates itself with patriotism and regards dissent as unpatriotic.

If not fighting terrorism and spreading democracy, what, then, is the true motivation behind the Bush administration’s foreign policy?

The creation of an international weapons market and the saturation of that market with US made weaponry. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are showcases for US military hardware.

According to a recently published report from The New American Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute, profits from US arms trade reached $32 billion in 2007, surpassing the revenues reported for 2001, when Bush took over the presidency, by three folds. The US arms trade market expanded from 123 states and territories to 174. The report stated that more than half of the developing countries the US supplies with weapons are undemocratic and/or engage in flagrant human rights abuses. The top 13 countries are: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Colombia, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia. Sales to these countries totaled over $16.2 billion in 2006 and 2007. Moreover, 20 of the 27 nations engaged in major armed conflict have been receiving weapons from the US. William D. Hartung, the lead author of the report, concluded: “The United States cannot demand respect for human rights and arm human rights abusers at the same time.”

Exactly Mr. Muntadar Al-Zaidi’s point.

And who is Mr. Al-Zaidi? A messenger from the Iraqi and the Arab streets who on a daily basis feels the gnawing effect of Bush ‘string of failed initiatives. A man whose hatred for Bush could not be detected by the Iraqi security officials and Secret Service personnel who screened him before entering the press conference. A man who if he had time to reach out and grab the next guy’s shoes to through at Bush, he would have done so. The Shoe Thrower and a couple of notches above Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber.

While lobbing his shoes at Bush like a major league baseball pitcher, Al-Zaidi yelled: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Making light of the incident, Bush stated:” “I don’t know what the guy’s cause is…”

We all do. ‘Cause he hates you, Mr. President. You can’t make people love you when all you sowed in their backyards are death and destruction.

Bush’s war against terrorism and advocacy of Democracy amounts to nothing more than a sales pitch. His deeply flawed foreign policies undermine democracies, inhibit peace, and encourage human rights abuses. His pseudo-philanthropic US funded anti-AIDS program in Africa, championed by his wife Laura Bush, for instance, is nothing more than an attention-grabber to set the stage for AFRICOM, the US arms sales representative for Africa, to pitch the real deal. It is a strategic race between the US and China to acquire African nations as clients. The US is engaged in similar races in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Here is a cultural/security suggestion Mr. President, hold your future press conferences in a Moslem countries in mosques; shoes are not allowed past the entrance.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008

Comments (2)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Add Comment Preview