THE ROVING EYE
By Pepe Escobar
In the end, President George W Bush ended up finding his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Munthather al-Zaidi, the 28-year-old Baghdad correspondent for the independent, anti-occupation, anti-sectarian, Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya satellite channel who sent Bush a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people" in the form of a flying pair of size 10s and instantly achieved folk hero status all over the Arab nation and across "the Internets" (copyright Bush), with a simple, graphically impeccable gesture brought to a close not only Bush's ultra-secretive last stop in Iraq (a press conference with sometime US puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki) but managed to sum up the whole Iraqi tragedy. No wonder he has been dubbed "the new Saladin" across the Arab world.
From now on three historic images will forever sum up the Bush administration-generated Iraqi tragedy: Bush's "Mission Accomplished" stunt off San Diego harbor; the "black scarecrow" figure tortured at Abu Ghraib; and Iraq's leather-soled kiss to the man who destroyed the country. The toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square in April 9, 2003, was nothing but a staged event for US networks.
Al-Zaidi called Bush, in Arabic, at the top of his lungs, ya kalb ("you dog") - now a legendary Youtube epithet that around the world has been largely interpreted as unfair to dogs, who for all their barking do not gang up and launch pre-emptive wars that cause more than 1 million deaths and displace more than 4 million people.
Before being taken down by US and Iraqi secret service ops, al-Zaidi still had time to yell, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq," - a factual, journalistic response to the lies he had just endured from Bush, who in his prepared remarks pontificated on the "success" of the recent parliament-approved Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a "success" Bush attributes to the troop "surge".
For the record: SOFA, negotiated after an extremely turbulent eight months, rules that the US military must totally withdraw from Iraq by December 2011 (a real timeline, always fought by the Bush camp); there will be no military bases left behind; and the US military cannot use Iraq to attack Iran or anyone else. For all practical purposes - and of course barring inexorable Pentagon pressure over president-elect Barack Obama - the neo-colonial Bush war/occupation will be over by the end of 2011. Bush's White House was so exultant with this "success" that it did not even publish a copy of SOFA in English.
By Pepe Escobar
In the end, President George W Bush ended up finding his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Munthather al-Zaidi, the 28-year-old Baghdad correspondent for the independent, anti-occupation, anti-sectarian, Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya satellite channel who sent Bush a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people" in the form of a flying pair of size 10s and instantly achieved folk hero status all over the Arab nation and across "the Internets" (copyright Bush), with a simple, graphically impeccable gesture brought to a close not only Bush's ultra-secretive last stop in Iraq (a press conference with sometime US puppet Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki) but managed to sum up the whole Iraqi tragedy. No wonder he has been dubbed "the new Saladin" across the Arab world.
From now on three historic images will forever sum up the Bush administration-generated Iraqi tragedy: Bush's "Mission Accomplished" stunt off San Diego harbor; the "black scarecrow" figure tortured at Abu Ghraib; and Iraq's leather-soled kiss to the man who destroyed the country. The toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square in April 9, 2003, was nothing but a staged event for US networks.
Al-Zaidi called Bush, in Arabic, at the top of his lungs, ya kalb ("you dog") - now a legendary Youtube epithet that around the world has been largely interpreted as unfair to dogs, who for all their barking do not gang up and launch pre-emptive wars that cause more than 1 million deaths and displace more than 4 million people.
Before being taken down by US and Iraqi secret service ops, al-Zaidi still had time to yell, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq," - a factual, journalistic response to the lies he had just endured from Bush, who in his prepared remarks pontificated on the "success" of the recent parliament-approved Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a "success" Bush attributes to the troop "surge".
For the record: SOFA, negotiated after an extremely turbulent eight months, rules that the US military must totally withdraw from Iraq by December 2011 (a real timeline, always fought by the Bush camp); there will be no military bases left behind; and the US military cannot use Iraq to attack Iran or anyone else. For all practical purposes - and of course barring inexorable Pentagon pressure over president-elect Barack Obama - the neo-colonial Bush war/occupation will be over by the end of 2011. Bush's White House was so exultant with this "success" that it did not even publish a copy of SOFA in English.
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