prvnizpravy.cz: Bushovi krátce po 11. září řekli, že byl otráven: Exprezident George W. Bush dostal několik týdn… http://t.co/W5VNMsuY

November 1, 2011 9:44 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

I’ll translate the part before the colon (the part after is incomplete anyway): “Shortly after 9/11 they told Bush he had been poisoned.”

Yes! And we get more details in the article referenced in that tweet, from tiscali.cz. This all comes from the interviews former National Security Advisor/Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is now doing to push her memoirs. In particular, this story is from an interview she recently did with ABC News – the American, not Australian, one presumably.

Apparently there were serious fears that the White House had been contaminated in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks with botulin toxin – that’s right: Botox! – which, when not being used to smooth over face-wrinkles, is also one of the most deadly toxins known in nature. During a trip Bush made to attend an APEC summit in Shanghai, the jolly face of Vice President Dick Cheney, back in Washington, came up on the video-conference screen to say that Botox had been detected at the White House and all who worked there were going to die. “What’s that? [CZ: Cože?] What’s that, Dick?” was Bush’s first response.

Of course, this needed to be checked out at the laboratory, where several lab mice were infected with the White House material. As her aid Steven Hadley then advised Rice: “Let me put it to you this way. If those mice are legs-up, we’re done for. If they are legs-down, we’re OK.” Naturally, after a tense 24 hours of waiting – all while carrying on with the summit as if nothing was wrong – Bush was whispered the message “Mice are legs-down,” no doubt mystifying the eavesdropping Chinese over the Americans’ new code system, but leaving the American delegation hugely relieved.

                          

Over at the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it was Nils Minkmar who drew the short straw to actually pay this man some token amount of the attention he was seeking in order to write about the brief book-tour. The result is The week of the retread (my own interpretation of the German word Wiedergänger), which turns out to be an excellent bit of coverage even as Minkmar’s distaste with the whole exercise comes through loud and clear. Of course he wouldn’t welcome George W. Bush’s reappearance: most of the European continent held Bush in rather low regard throughout most of his presidency and certainly do now, when they can be compelled to think about him at all. The lede:

The preparation for the TV appearances on the occasion of his book lasted two years. After three days no one talked about them anymore. The comeback with his memoirs was a PR-disaster, as is only fitting for George W. Bush

Minkmar does brieflly go into the bizarre “scoop” Bush had ready with which to reward his TV-hosts, namely the strange tale of his mother showing him the preserved-in-formaldehyde remains of a stillborn sibling. But it is rather two other elements that stand out. The first is rapper Kanye West; apparently it was his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” remark in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster which moved NBC to invite West on the air after the Bush-Matt Lauer “Today” interview to give a response. There West managed to deliver a reasoned message on racism that completely overshadowed anything the ex-president had just said! If there was one name on people’s lips as a result of this book-tour, Minkmar claims, it was “West” and not “Bush.”

The second notable bit which Minkmar emphasizes is the torture issue, which inevitably reared its ugly head no matter how much Bush might have preferred to send such questioners off to consult his book about it instead. Minkmar asks, Wasn’t a government prosecutor listening in when Bush explicitly confirmed and defended his approval for torture techniques during his time in office? When, in response to questions of “Isn’t that illegal?”, he responded that, in fact, it must have been legal because his lawyers told him that it was? This hiding-behind-your-lawyer defense is particularly ironic, he notes, when contrasted with the tough, no-nonsense “Decider” persona which Bush was using the book and this book-tour to try to establish as how he will be remembered through History.

And indeed, that is what is important: not this brief and cynical publicity campaign, but George W. Bush’s historical legacy. Minkmar:

His appearances were deeply saddening for all friends of the United States. Here was a man challenged above his abilities, who took over at the beginning of the century an admired, young superpower and in just eight years plunged it into a financial, political and above all moral ditch. The judicial working-out of this era has hardly yet properly begun. That must change after this week.

                          

We do have at least a start, with Marcus Ziener in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt of all places (The president’s eternal string-puller). He zeroes in (as does Rove in his book, apparently) on the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – two of the George W. Bush administration’s biggest blunders, but not to hear Rove tell it. No, they were just unfortunate misunderstandings. Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie!” was nothing more than a gesture of morale support to a staff-member under pressure. And as for Iraq, the President was certain Saddam had WMD – he certainly would not have invaded the country at all had he known that he didn’t.

Up in his piece’s lede, Ziener makes the rather obvious observation that, with this book and the new publicity tour designed to sell it, Bush’s former leading political strategist is out to rehabilitate not only the reputation of the president he served, but also his own. Actually, it probably goes rather beyond that: when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rove (along with some other involved officials, especially former VP Dick Cheney) apparently feels the need to take some pre-emptive action to ward off a potential criminal indictment for conspiracy to torture – a crime against humanity all of us can recognize when we see it, and contrary both to the Geneva Conventions and US law. This lashing-out is what we see in his statement yesterday to the BBC in which he asserted he was even “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists.” (You can click the video on that BBC page to hear the words come out of “Turdblossom’s” very mouth; for me, hearing his voice this morning was all I needed to quickly switch to some other radio station.)

And again, reaction in the European press is disappointing so far. (Of course, less time has elapsed since Rove went on the BBC.) What there is, is generally just a straight transmission of his remarks, suitably translated. At least we do have Lidové noviny of the Czech Republic (Waterboarding is not torture, assets former Bush advisor). Yes, the report itself (from the Czech news agency CTK) just passes on what Rove has to say. But some on-line editorial assistant has also shrewdly inserted counterpoint in the form of a brief YouTube video about waterboarding from Amnesty International. (Check it out, if you want: it’s not so very shocking, even as it makes the point.)

UPDATE: Look, I don’t intend to touch Rove’s book with a ten-foot pole. But if you’re interested, I do have to admit that it’s still available from Amazon (at that link I gave you at the top of the post) for $16.50 with free shipping and mishandling (h/t to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon).

                          

A jocular American ex-president gives a talk for the first time since the transition-of-power in January: his new house needs to be paid for.

Note that this “gotta pay for the house” schtick is not Ytzen trying to be snarky; rather, Bush himself brought up that particular meme at the event, trying to be jolly for the audience, and added “I just bought a house in the fall. I might be the only American who dared to buy a house in the fall of 2008.” Hyuk-hyuk.

He also let slip that “I am flattered that there are people at all who want to listen to me,” and whether or not this was another attempt at humor, it rather hits the Truth nail straight on the head. But as Ytzen notes in his piece, it’s probably not so surprising that the Canadian state of Alberta would offer the venue for Bush’s first public-speaking engagement: it’s supposedly known as the “Northern Texas” for its oil industry and is Canada’s most conservative state. But that did not stop a group of protestors from gathering outside the event itself anyway, holding banners with slogans such as “Canada is no Bush-land!” and “Throw a shoe at him, make him go away!”

The event’s organizers did not care to disclose how much the ex-president was paid for the appearance, although admission for what was billed as “Conversation with George W. Bush” did cost a cool C$3,100 (= $2,441 or €1,857) per person. For anyone who cares, it seems Bush’s inevitable book will be shaped around his “12 hardest decisions.” Despite what people were paying, he declined while in Calgary to go into any further detail about which decisions those were.

UPDATE: And what would any George W. Bush public appearance be without at least one accompanying malapropism? Scott Horton from Harpers has the details here. The Politiken article did not mention this (the English vocabulary at issue was maybe too advanced); I had read of Bush’s “authoritarian” comment elsewhere, but not from the European press.

                          

Time to assess reactions to that historical event from over on this side of the Atlantic. I’m tempted just to see what the Netherlands press has to say, particularly because of the great cover on today’s editions of the local quality free paper, De Pers: The black Jesus has landed! (Careful with that link: it will download for you the PDF of the entire issue.) “And now Barack Obama, since yesterday the new boss of the world, must really get to work,” the headline continues. “He is being looked to for carrying out wonders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

I like that sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek attitude (at least I think that’s what the De Pers editors intended there), but let’s briefly survey instead coverage from the French press, to which it seems I traditionally turn first in the wake of some significant global event.

For one thing, the occasion of Obama’s inauguration seems to have inspired a bunch of graphic features that are fairly user-friendly even to the non-French-speaking. For instance, you can check out here, thanks to Libération, the president’s new armored limousine. (Yes, it’s true that each of those flashing orange dots is there to reveal further scintillating detail about the vehicle only in French, but you should be able to understand the fundamental spec numbers there on the page, inside that red box, fairly easily.)

Or here is an on-line video from Le Point: “SEE – The sensual dance of Barack and Michelle Obama at the beginning of the ball.” The text then continues (just above the video itself):

After taking the oath of the 44th American president [sic], Barack Obama, white tie and black tuxedo, and his spouse, dressed in a long dress signed by the young New York designer Jason Wu, leaving one shoulder completely bare, opened on Tuesday evening the “Neighborhood Ball,” the first of ten “official” inauguration balls in which the presidential couple were to participate.

Entwined, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama danced to the song “At Last,” a slow number interpreted by the R’n'B star Beyonce Knowles, on a scene decorated with an immense American flag.

Oh, and perhaps once last dig at the departed 43rd president is in order here as well: L’Express offers The best of the worst of Bush, a “small review of the unusual moments of ‘W’ at the White House.” For example, you’ll see again here Dubya doing his best at African dance, but the one I particularly like is the panicky scene of him at the wheel of a vintage Russian car, with Vladimir Putin intervening from beside him.

Between Jealousy and Fascination

We’ll have to forgive the French their self-absorption, but it remains true that among the most interesting subjects of the coverage there of Obama’s inauguration is the sort of interplay that can be expected between him and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The consensus seems to be that Obama will do much to dull what has recently been Sarkozy’s bright public profile world-wide.

You really have to concede the label “consensus” when you find such a viewpoint espoused in print not only in the rather left-wing Libération (Nicolas Sarkozy, the drama of jealousy), which is definitely not a paper boasting many admirers of the French president, but also by Alain Barluet in the Sarkozy-organ Le Figaro (For Sarkozy, an American “buddy” who will be a rival). That this is an issue at all can be attributed directly to George W. Bush: both articles speak plainly of an American vide (“emptiness,” or “absence”) in the world dating back at least to the Georgian crisis of early August, and then of course lasting onward through the various economic and financial collapses of the autumn – remember Bush’s lame-duck hosting of that G20 summit in mid-November? – to the latest Gaza crisis. This Bush administration policy vacuum, together with France’s presidency of the EU in the second half of last year, provided Sarkozy with the opportunity to jump onto the world stage and gain quite a lot of attention, despite still being, as the Libération writer Antoine Guiral reminds us, “at the head of a mid-range economic and military power.”

Now there’s a new top dog in town, and Sarkozy will have to give way. That’s the conclusion both writers cannot help but avoid, although naturally Le Figaro soft-peddles the message considerably. There, Sarkozy is nonetheless Obama’s copain – which really translates as “buddy,” or “close friend” – and also the one who was predicting “This guy will go far” as early as the two men’s first meeting (of two total so far) back in September of 2006, when Obama was just a US Senator and Sarkozy was just the French Interior Minister. Still, Barluet has to concede at the very end of his piece that Sarkozy realizes full well that “for his new partner, occupied first of all by domestic questions, he will not be a priority.”

For his part, Libération’s Guiral twists this knife a bit more cruelly. (No one ever said that French internal politics was not a contact sport.) In his account, Sarkozy has been trying strenously already to score the first face-to-face meeting with Obama from a European leader, but with little prospect for any success in doing so before the American president is scheduled to attend the next G20 summit in London (and thereby, essentially, meet everyone) on April 2. So Sarkozy is being left, in Guiral’s account, on the sidelines of the American’s attention to “oscillate between fascination and jealousy.” After all, he was known himself as a fairly early-achiever, defying an outsider’s background to become French president at age 52, but now the 47-year-old Obama has outclassed him. What’s more, as Guiral viciously continues, “[i]n the world Obama raises hopes while Sarkozy prompts above all curiosity through his wife Carla, his bad manners, and his energy-to-spare.”

                          

The key element of Burcharth’s analysis here, as he assesses the two Bush presidential terms, is the radical change brought to the course of that presidency by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It’s probably not the most original point, but it might still be instructive to contemplate – if we can remember back that far – how things were shaping up for the Bush presidency before that historic day. A minor crisis with China over the capture of an American spy-plane (remember that?) had been resolved peaceably after all; Bush had “looked into [Vladimir Putin's] soul” – right after hosting his visit in order to notify him that the United States no longer intended to take seriously the ABM Treaty – and had concluded that this Putin was a regular guy with whom one could do business. Burcharth’s verdict here is that it was mostly looking like Bush was getting ready to govern in the same moderate, fairly-inclusive style that had marked his previous tenure as Texas governor; only European displeasure over his repudiation of the Kyoto climate-change accords (which Bill Clinton had in any case killed by refusing to submit them to Congressional ratification) and the heavy tax-cuts he had managed to push through for the rich investor class gave any inklings of further trouble ahead.

But then came the attacks in New York and Washington, and (as Burcharth quotes Prof. Gordon Adams of American University), “at that moment Bush washed the slate clean.” Moderate influences among his circle of advisors (Powell, Rice) lost influence that was gained instead by Rove, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. What then followed (after the attack into Afghanistan, which was widely sanctioned by intenational opinion) is a fairly well-known, and depressing, story: Iraq (which vitiated the anti-Taleban and anti-Al Qaeda effort in Afghanistan), Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, the PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, widespread (and illegal) domestic wiretapping and other monitoring, etc.

Bush also permanently lost support from broad European public opinion – from the European street – from at least that historical February Saturday in 2003 when untold thousands demonstrated in cities across the European continent against the approaching war in Iraq. Interestingly, though, in Burcharth’s view the elite European political classes eventually came back to Bush, especially during his second term in office, because they could not find or even imagine any other Western leadership than that which the US could provide, and because over time Bush became somewhat less arrogant and dismissive of them – at least to some point, one imagines, where they could hold their noses and work with together him on things like dissuading Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Terrorist-Obsessed

This same cooperative stage was never reached, unfortunately, when it came to the Democrats in Congress. Bush in any event was able to paint them as the “Defeatocrats” and so reduce their numbers considerably in the 2002 mid-term elections, and from then on he was content to ignore them. This did have the infelicitous effect that he was thenceforth unable to get major legislation passed – e.g. no immigration reform, no Social Security reform, the sole exception being an immensely-expensive expansion in Medicare entitlements whose passage through Congress was oiled by outright misinformation as to its potential future costs. But, in Burcharth’s depiction of the Bush White House, that was OK: the single emphasis was anyway on defeating terrorism and making sure that no sort of attack would hit America again. (That’s where the “obsessed Bush” in the title comes from, and Burcharth apparently means it. It’s a rather interesting picture when you contrast it with Bush greeting his August, 2001, vacation intelligence briefing – “Osama Determined to Strike in US” – with nothing more than the remark to his CIA briefer, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” How does Burcharth resolve this seeming contradiction?) And indeed, one of the thin reeds the departing president has been able to cling to in his “farewell” tour of interviews, speeches, and press conferences is his statement that America has not been attacked since September 11, 2001.

Strangely, then (especially coming from a Danish journalist), in Burcharth’s account here George W. Bush comes across as something very close to the nation’s unappreciated guardian, laboring mightily and continuously to ensure that his nation does not have to face the horrors of any more terrorist attacks again. Yes, he talks about George W. Bush’s many failures in office, but it is that picture that predominates. It’s even there in the article’s lede: “[Bush] neither wished to nor was able to put the tragedy [Sept. 11] behind him. In the meantime ordinary Americans turned back to a normal existence . . .” – yes, these silly, shallow citizens who are so quick to forget the grave threats to our civilization posed by the terrorists. But the nation’s presidential night-watchman was always there, in the Situation Room (or wherever), haunted throughout the rest of his term in office by the great failing that he had allowed on his watch – just like Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spiderman, is haunted by how he allowed his beloved Uncle Ben to be murdered by the thief he could not be troubled to apprehend, is it like that, Mr. Burcharth? – spending the rest of his days at the White House in a lonely vigil to protect the Homeland.

It’s a remarkable tableau, to be sure, and we are indebted to Burcharth for presenting it. I personally don’t really recall things happening like that, though. And far too many of us out there – including many eminent historians – are content simply to regard George W. Bush instead as the worst president in American history.

UPDATE: I like to at least e-mail journalists to notify them when I discuss their articles on this weblog, and Martin Burcharth was kind enough to go read the above entry and then to respond. According to him, the “Spidey Bush” interpretation I presented of George W. Bush carrying out an obsessive, lonely vigil to make sure the terrorists never strike his country again was a misinterpretation of what he wrote. He takes pains to emphasize to me that he had no intention of praising Bush, and there is certainly enough in the rest of his piece that is directly critical of Bush’s tenure as US president to make that believable. Rather, what he was writing about was Bush’s “pathological obsession with the terrorist threat,” and at the same time how Bush found in that threat “a paradigm for his presidency” – namely (if I understand him correctly) something that provided him with justification to govern as he desired. That terrorist threat enabled him to be the sort of all-powerful president he was looking to be, clearly superior among the three branches of the American federal government, with plenty of money budgeted for defense and a clear enemy to rally the people against.

CORRECTION: George Bush got “a sense of [Vladimir Putin's] soul” not in the US, but rather when meeting him in Slovenia in June, 2001, while on his first European tour.

                          

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

                          

But what about, say, the Dutch? Fortunately, we can now discover their valedictory attitudes towards George W. Bush, and that even from the “People’s Newspaper,” De Volkskrant (Netherlanders give Bush a 4.7).

That’s right, as a final over-all grade ol’ George gets a 4.7, but keep in mind that is on the customary Dutch academic grading-scale of 0 (worst) to 10 (best), where you usually need a 6 to pass. This comes from a survey among 500 Dutch respondents over 18 conducted by the firm Synovate, which further reveals the curious paradox that, while 73% are willing to characterize the departing American president as “friendly,” 71% call him “untrustworthy.” When it comes to free association (i.e. what immediately comes to mind when you hear a word), most of the respondents think “Iraq” at the mention of his name. It further emerges that you are a better bet to dislike him the more educated and older you are, and the more to the left you are on the Dutch political spectrum (also if you are female). Of the various policies associated with his name, these Dutch judge approvingly only his reaction to the September 11 attacks. Everything else they disapprove of, especially his attitude towards climate change.

Finally, the survey-participants were asked what sort of going-away present they would be willing to give. Among the responses: a course in self-knowledge, a week spent among the poor, and “a kick in the ass.”

                          

Yes, the shoe-company (or -person, I don’t know; I’ve no facility in Turkish, it’s not a European language, sorry) is “Ramazan Baydan,” and it/he has already received more than 300,000 orders for that model and counting. The all-too-brief piece also reveals certain additional characteristics about them: made of brown leather, with a thick sole (ah, but does not one need a thick sole to reside in Baghdad these days?), priced at $42/€30 a pair. From the picture at the top (looks like a crowd of Indonesian protestors), we also see that the shoes are loafers (i.e. no laces), which makes sense from a weapons standpoint: better for deploying to one’s throwing-hand quickly, especially in that most-critical interval when you have already thrown one and hope to get the second one despatched as well before any bystanders or security personnel can react.

Sorry, no actual link or any other information other than “Ramazan Baydan” about where to go to get your own pair – time to head for Google! But it seems that very many Americans have already solved that puzzle and placed an order – thus the GVA article’s title.

UPDATE: Here you go! H/t to Bloomberg’s Mark Bentley, it turns out that the place to go for your “Bye-Bye-Bush” shoes is the Baydan Group. Fair warning: Even on their “English” site (to which the preceding link connects you, of course), they still use Turkish extensively.

                          

Which of the many available European lenses to take up for review of this incident? Obviously it should be from a culture with a certain shoe-expertise; the Italian press thereby suggests itself, but long-time readers (Hi Mom!) will realize that Italian coverage is here on €S an exception rather than a rule, due mainly to considerations of linguistic familiarity. The French should be a perfectly-suitable substitute.

Turning first to the newspaper of record, Le Monde gives Bush’s Baghdad shoe-in rather curious, even somewhat schizophrenic, coverage. The main article – Bush and Iraq: “The task has not been easy but has been necessary”, with by-line only to Le Monde and to the French news-agency AFP – takes the high road and only describes Bush’s Baghdad visit and his remarks there – that is, just the hightops of his stay – without mention of any untoward incident to otherwise clog up its account. But then in two separate paragraphs lower on the page, to the left and in their own grey-shaded area, it does give the basic details of the shoe-throwing episode: who the guy was, the accompanying insults, etc.

A Viral Video Already

Then, in an entirely separate on-line article, the newspaper treats the truly notable side-phenomenon in play here, namely how the video-clip has widely been exposed to a world very hungry for it (The Web seizes images of Bush dodging thrown shoes, by-line AFP). According to this piece, already 70 videos having to do with the incident have been submitted to YouTube, where they had already been viewed 600,000 times by noon on Monday, 15 DEC 08. Meanwhile, on another video site Dailymotion, about fifty videos had been submitted and viewed by that same time-point more than 200,000 times. Comments accompanying the videos have ranged from admiration at the President’s skill in dodging (“Bush should be good at playing Wii-Fit!” wrote one viewer on YouTube) to suggestions that al-Zeidi be awarded the Nobel Prize. And indeed, each of the on-line articles in the French press gathered for this round-up featured prominently-embedded videos of the shoe-throwing action. (I recommend as best the one on the Nouvel Observateur page, since it shows the action first at normal speed, with all accompanying audio, and then again in slow-motion like a sports-action replay.)

The article in Libération – Bush avoids the pump-hit; I suspect that this might be a French attempt at a clever pun-headline – does in fact have a super-sized version of the video at its top, with another just over to the right. But the editors of that rather left-wing French paper, like those of Le Monde, also seem afflicted here by a curious streak of even-handedness towards the American president. It’s true that the piece starts out, after the lede, with “The American president George W. Bush has known his last misadventure in Iraq, just avoiding receiving at full-face a pair of shoes thrown by an Iraqi journalist at the moment when he had just affirmed that ‘victory is near’.” (Actually, that’s not true, what the unnamed author claimed Bush to be saying. As you can clearly hear on the Nouvel Observateur video, Bush was merely saying “thank you” in Arabic to Nouri al-Maliki just before the wing-tips took flight.) But then this piece has for much of its second half rather extensive coverage of the praise lavished on Bush during this last visit by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. It also notes at the end that, of Bush’s handful of visits to the country, this one “is the first time that he comes to a country relatively pacified” – something that is really more a matter of opinion.

It’s not properly French, but do let me include here coverage on the incident from the Belgian French-language paper La Libre Belgique – An Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at Bush. La Libre adds some interesting details that I don’t find anywhere else, mainly about what did and did not happen at Bush’s follow-on destination after Baghdad, namely Kabul, Afghanistan. Naturally, some of the journalists there at the press conference Bush held with Afghan president Hamid Karzai were bracing themselves for some sort of repeat there of the shoe-throwing in Baghdad. (The ones who were not were simply those who had not yet heard about the Iraqi incident, which had at that point occurred only a couple of hours previously.) Perhaps their worries were heightened by the fact that the security-screening to which the journalists had to submit for access to that Afghan press conference had devoted no particular extra attention to their footwear. In fact, according to the article one Afghan newspaperman did try to goad a TV-reporter colleague to action, calling him a loafer and a sneaker (OK, so I made that last part up) and urging him to throw his own footgear into the anti-Bush cause. But that TV reporter, his instigator, and everyone else ended up behaving themselves in the end.

What Further for the Thrower?

Was that perhaps simply the prudent thing to do? Put another way, how will our Iraqi shoe-throwing ace, Muntadar al-Zeidi, be brought to heel? On that subject it’s that aforementioned Nouvel Observateur article that has the answers (Bush attacked: 200 lawyers to defend the show-thrower). One the one hand you have one Iraqi lawyer quoted in this piece that al-Zeidi is due for two years in jail for “having insulted a foreign head of state visiting Iraq,” and it’s also true that he is now in detention and has already been subject to repeated interrogations, mainly to ascertain whether any outside government or other agency sponsored what he did. (He also was tested for drug and alcohol intoxication.) On the other, al-Zeidi’s employer, the “Al-Baghdadiya” TV network, has appealed for his release, and he has picked up the support of one Khalil Doulaimi, a Jordan-based former lawyer for no less than Saddam Hussein. Doulaimi further maintains that he could easily recruit two hundred other legal colleagues – among them some Americans, he claims – to join him in al-Zeidi’s defense, all working for free. He adds: “For an Iraqi this is the least thing to do to Bush, a criminal tyrant who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zeidi should be set free immediately.”

We should eventually know what al-Zeidi’s fate will be, if he does not simply disappear into the maw of the Iraqi prison system. We truly owe the man something, for providing a simple but classic and very-physical metaphor for expressing the lingering feelings of so many Americans and other peoples of the world for George W. Bush. To be sure, far more serious legal and investigative measures are in order to call him to account, but I think that for Inauguration Day – mark my words! – we can definitely expect some sort of footgear theme to be introduced into the festivities.