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Each Shoe Was Worth a Thousand Words
PATRICK COCKBURN
Counterpunch
Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008
The sight of the Iraqi reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi hurling his
shoes at President Bush at a press conference in Baghdad will
gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious,
useless, and almost invariably obsequious, events. "This
is a farewell kiss," shouted Mr Zaidi. "This is from
the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."
Official press conferences of any kind seldom produce real news,
but the worst are usually those given by foreign leaders on trips
abroad in which they and their local ally suggest that they are
in control of events and all is going according to plan.
One of the many infuriating, though also ludicrous, events in
Iraq since the invasion of 2003 has been American and British
leaders, arriving in secret at the enormous US base at Baghdad
airport and travelling, accompanied by numerous armed guards,
by helicopter to the heavily-fortified Green Zone. After a few
hours there they would give upbeat press conferences, sitting
alongside the Iraqi leader of the day, claiming significant improvements
in security and chiding the assembled journalists for ignoring
such clear signs of success.
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Periodically reality would break in, such as the time a mortar
bomb exploded nearby the press conference hall at the very moment
when UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon was lauding security improvements,
compelling him to cower down behind a display of artificial flowers.
Visiting US politicians during the presidential election sought
determinedly to manicure what American television viewers would
see. Diplomats at the US embassy complained that staffers of Republican
candidate Senator John McCain had asked them not to wear helmets
and body armour when standing next to him in case these protective
measures might appear to contradict his claim that the US military
was close to military victory. For similar reasons staffers of
the Vice President Dick Cheney demanded that the siren giving
a seven or eight second warning of incoming rockets or mortar
rounds to people in the Green Zone be turned off during his visits.
I used to comfort myself with the thought that these official
visits did little harm even if they did no good. Iraqis were all
too aware of the grim reality of their lives to be taken in by
official posturing. After five years of war, American voters have
seen too many claims of success in Iraq deflated by news of fresh
slaughter to be deceived into thinking that the war was being
won.
In retrospect I think I was over-optimistic: the foreign leaders
who visited the Green Zone or other US or British military camps
came away with the dangerous idea that they knew something about
Iraq. They would depart not realizing that the most important
political fact was that the majority of Iraqis detested the US-led
occupation whatever they thought of Saddam Hussein. Even the foreign
minister Hoshyar Zebari, widely seen as pro-American called the
occupation "the mother of all mistakes". This explains
the popular enthusiasm for Mr Zaidi on display in Baghdad yesterday.
The history of the Iraqi occupation is now beginning to feel
like ancient history but it is relevant because the US and Britain
are committing elsewhere so many of the same mistakes as they
did in Iraq. Just at the moment when Mr Bush was dodging footwear
in Baghdad, accompanied by the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki,
Gordan Brown was appearing with the Pakistani president Asif Ali
Zardari in Islamabad.
Mr Zardari is seen as a weak leader, uncertain of what he should
do and with limited authority over the military. But, as in Iraq
in the past, his constant appearance besides visiting foreign
dignitaries convinces Pakistanis that he is a US puppet. The constant
finger-wagging against Pakistan by Mr Brown, the US secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and others may do something to encourage
the Pakistani government to act against organizations like Lashkar-e-Toiba
and its civilian arm Jamaat-ud-Dawa. But it also encourages a
sense in Pakistan that it is being besieged, encircled by India
to the east and a pro-Indian Afghan government to the west. The
US drone attacks on Pakistani territory increase this fear of
military encirclement.
One does not have to spend long in Pakistan to discover that
many Pakistanis, perhaps a majority, dislike the US more than
they do India. It is all very well for Mr Brown to call for "action
not words" against terrorists in Pakistan but this is a truly
impossible task even if President Zardari were a leader of real
authority. The US and the Iraqi government, with vast resources
at their disposal, have failed to eliminate al-Qa'ida in the heart
of Baghdad where there are regular suicide bomb attacks and assassinations.
I visited the Jamaat-ud-Dawa headquarters in Lahore just before
it was closed last week and its members exuded confidence that
nobody was going to put them permanently out of business. State
authority in Pakistan is eroding by the day. In Peshawar, the
city at the mouth of the Khyber pass through which flow 75 per
cent of supplies to western forces in Afghanistan, several hundred
well-armed gunmen have calmly taken over depots filled with US
military vehicles and burned them to the ground.
At this point somebody is bound to suggest that Pakistan is a
failed state without realising that they are entering dangerous
ground. Foreign Policy magazine in Washington does an annual survey
of supposedly failed states in which Pakistan is ranked number
nine in 2008. But a failed state does not necessarily a mean a
weak country or a society unable to defend itself. It is precisely
in such allegedly failed states as Lebanon, Somalia and Iraq that
the US has suffered its greatest foreign policy disasters over
the past quarter century.
One small lesson of the debacle in Iraq might be to cut back
on these official visits such as those by Mr Bush and Mr Brown
last Sunday. In Islamabad Mr Brown's demand for a crack down on
terrorism makes any action taken by the host government look as
if it is cravenly acquiescing to a foreign power. In Baghdad Mr
Bush could see for the first time in five years, in the shape
of pair of shoes hurtling towards him, what so many Iraqis really
think of him.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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