I can't say I blame the man

[winterbadger]

In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, Iraqi television journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi stood up and shouted "this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog," before hurling a shoe at Mr Bush which narrowly missed him.

Showing the soles of shoes to someone is a sign of contempt in Arab culture.

With his second shoe, which the president also managed to dodge, Mr Zaidi said: "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."

Mr Zaidi, a correspondent for Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya TV, was then wrestled to the ground by security personnel and hauled away.

I'm not saying I think that violence ever solves anything, but one of the reasons I didn't go see the guy when he came by my worksite was fear I wouldn't be able to resist doing something similar.

I can be ashamed, as an American, that this man has been my president for the last eight years. But for Iraqis, whose nation he and his incompetent cronies have done their best to destroy... Well, an honest man would have stood there and let the shoe hit him in the face. It's the least he deserves.

Comments

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Yes. Nice one. Hee hee!

Though to be fair to Bush (did I really just write that?) Saddam Hussein and chums had spent near on half a century bestializing Iraq already - Bush and co's crime was firstly it seems a sort of contemptuous ignorance of history/the facts, the complications of which meant that they should have thought far more carefully before wading in with their simplistic solutions. At least that's my rough impression from newspapers, not having studied this professionally, he adds hastily...

[winterbadger]

The Ba'athists *had* totally brutalised Iraq. And the international community's sanctions had crushed it even further (I really hope that one legacy of Iraq would have been that people would stop the idiocy of thinking that punishing a whole country is a good way of getting at a dictator, but I fear that the world is far too stupid to grasp that).

But there was still electricity (most of the time). There was running water, fairly dependably. There were markets that weren't blown up by bombs. There were roads you could travel without hitting landmines of being stopped by militias who would pull you out of your car and shoot you for being the wrong sect or the wrong ethnicity or not having enough money to bribe them. Sewers worked *most* places. There were lots and lots of functioning schools, colleges, and universities. Kidnapping and murder were limited more or less to really bad-crime areas and to the secret police; now they're everywhere.

Yes, hundreds, thousands of people were arrested, thrown in jail, and tortured for the "crime" of criticising the government. But compare that to today, when not only is the government training a new generation of torturers and jailers and using them on their political opponents, but they are doing it under the protective arm (and in some cases presumably, guidance) of the United States and its allies.

The Iraq of 2003 before the invasion and the Iraq of 2008 are like day and a very dark and troubled night. One was possessed by a powerful, evil man who created stability and order with fear and cruelty. The other is filled with cruelty, fear, murder, civil and religious war, terrorism and widespread criminality, and has almost no stability or order at all, other than what lives in the arms-reach orbit of Allied troops or the few noncorrupt, nonsectarian Iraqi security services. If those people move to the next street or the next neighborhood, god help you, because everything they banished briefly will come flooding back.

And all of that I really do put at the door of the Bush Administration, because they *broke* the country without any sort of realistic plan for *fixing* it, with the knowledge of how to do better readily available to them but ignored because it didn't fit their dogmatic worldview. There has to be a very deep and unpleasant level of Hell for people who do this sort of damage to the world out of stubbornness and spite. And the sooner all the architects of this war are in it, the better.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

I thoroughly agree. You put it better than I could.

The only spark of enjoyment I can get from the situation, and it's a tiny one and of no interest to anyone in Iraq, is that the whole mess - added to the financial meltdown - makes so plain and stark and obvious the vast, vast gulf between how very clever these Bushies thought they were, and how totally dumb they really are.

[winterbadger]

That is some comfort, true. But what I find frustrating is that I think some of them (and their supporters) still refuse to see that, even now.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Oh, that sort of person does. They're too stupid to ever see reality. They'll loudly proclaim their own wonderfulness till the end of their days, like Thatcher and Hitler, and claim that it all failed just because other people let them down.

[histoire68.livejournal.com]

I think it goes beyond contemptuous ignorance into... something far more egregious. I mean, winterbadger knows far more about this stuff than I do, but when they started making all the noise about invading Iraq, I had taken one undergraduate course in the history of the Middle East, and I knew it was a stupid idea and wasn't going to achieve what they claimed (weakening Islamist terrorists). Because the Ba'athists and the Islamists were enemies, so duh, you topple the Baathist government and you're going to create a power vacuum that makes it easier, not harder, for Islamists to flourish.

The enemy of your enemy may not be your friend necessarily, but you don't go destroying the enemy of your enemy when you really want to get at your enemy. That just makes no sense. Anyway. I mean, I knew this, and I was just a random history student! So it's just not possible that they didn't know exactly what they were doing. No, they knew. The stupid thing is an act. They had their own reasons for what they did that had nothing to do with the "War on Terra."

[winterbadger]

Mmmm, no, having seen into some of the holes and corners around the DC policymaking establishment, I can safely say, yes, they really were this stupid. They knew (at least some of them knew) the history; they just figured what they could do would rewrite history, that history would lose its relevance int he face of their compelling logic. Yes, they understood that there were ethnic and religious tensions, but they figured that the things *they* value (American-style democracy and free markets) would be far more compelling to people than "old news" like sectarianism.

Plus, they were ignoring Sorkin's First Law of Management and listening only to people who were tellign them what they wanted to hear. People like Achmed Chalabi, a plausible rogue, an educated, connected, Westernised Shi'a Muslim who assured them that all of their dreams were true. And they didn't stop to think that, gee, maybe someone who is of the educated elite and has lived outside the country most of his life might not be (a) the best person to tell you what's going on there now and (b) the best person to put in charge of things once you knock over the anthill. No, they saw someone like themselves who told them that all of their assumptions were correct and that he would handle all the details for them. And that was a very comfortable things, so they gave him big handouts and promises, and relied on his word.

I don't think that the war was really about WMD (the main reason they claimed) or about terrorism (the excuse they fell back on when WMD turned out not to be there, as they had had good reason to suspect).

But I think what it was about is what they've been talking about for a long time: this heroic but incredibly misguided vision that by taking down Saddam Hussein (which I believe Bush wanted to do for personal reasons), they could create a democracy that would then become both a home for a viral democracy spreading throughout the region (which would serve Israeli and American interest--because everything neo-con relating to the ME is, IMO, a joint Israel-US operation) and a counterweight, perhaps eventually a deathblow, to the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Never attribute to shadowy conspiracy what can be attributed to stupidity, self-absorption, and vanity, would be my advice.

[histoire68.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I mean, I think MOST people are not mega-stupid. And I think that non-mega-stupid people, while they may sometimes make mistakes, often do and say exactly what they mean to. Now maybe it doesn't turn out the way they want. But I think stupidity is an excuse people are allowed to hide behind way too often.

Look at it this way: if they actually cared about democracy, why would they be taking a giant steaming dump all over the rule of law in the US?

Also look at who benefits from a protracted war in Iraq: the "security companies" -- really, this so-called war is about a gigantic transfer of wealth from the US treasury to those companies like Halliburton and Blackwater.

And ultimately that's what the Bush presidency has been all about. Having a big ass party for him and his buddies with the treasury's money.

So, you know. It was never a good idea, but I don't think it was an accident is what I'm saying.

[winterbadger]

I don't think that anyone is justifying their *own* actions by saying they're stupid. That's not what I'm saying. And though I think their actions have a consistency that only makes sense to them, I do believe it does make sense to them. I think they acted stupidly, but I don't for a moment think that most of the people involved in this were stupid.

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EDIT: I see the sentence of mine you are responding to, and that was bad phrasing on my part. I don't think they are stupid people; I think they acted stupidly and made bad assumptions on which to base some grave and far-reaching actions. Assumptions like "the lessons of history do not apply to our situation because circumstances have changed" and "we can rely more on people we know who are like us for the truth than on people who are less like us and are telling us something that doesn't fit with the reality we want to believe".
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Did Lincoln believe in democracy? Did FDR? I have no doubt at all in my mind that they did. But they were more than happy to trample on individual civil rights in order to do what they felt had to be done for the greater good. And that's going to happen from time to time, whether anyone likes it or not. The question is how far it goes and what the greater good is one that most of us can agree about.

I also think that this is a lot more complicated than a plot to make a couple of corporations rich. They could accomplish that without this war. And while I think a lot of the people involved in creating and implementing this strategy are bad people, I do not believe that they are all, or even most of them, greedhounds.

It seems to me that what you're suggesting is that everything that's happened is either just what the architects of the plan meant to have happen, or it is tangential to it and not important to them. And I think that's dead wrong.

You don't think that what has happened was *accidental*? Seriously? You think that the some of guys who ran this policy totally destroyed their careers in federal service just so as to give some corporations lots of money? You think that Bush completely destroyed his presidential legacy in the name of paypackets for buddies? Lyndon Johnson didn't even *start* the Vietnam War, but no matter all his other accomplishments, that's what sticks with most Americans about his administration, I think. It certainly destroyed him personally, physically and emotionally. I look at Bush in that press conference after the guy threw th shoes at him, and I see someone who is blustering because he *knows* just how guilty he is and is desperately trying to convince himself, as well as his listeners, that the ghosts that keep him awake at night are just phantasms.

No, I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you completely.

*****
EDIT: I sense in your responses a desire for all this badness, all the pain and suffering and destruction to have at least been *purposeful*, even if the purpose was bad. A desire to believe that this awful a series of events must come from a calculated, rational plan that worked, even if the plan was made by wicked men for selfish ends. Unfortunately, I think that was not the case here. In fact, the more I read history, the more I think that calamity is rarely the result of clever and despicable planning--more often it's the result of circumstances acting on human intentions in a totally unforeseen way.

Now, it's tragic that a lot of the action we've seen in the last five years *was* foreseeable, was in fact foreseen by others in the USG who were ignored. But I don't think that that ignoring was done in a calculated way in order to produce the results we've seen.

[winterbadger]

Frankly, even if all this *was* a giant plot to enrich US corporations, running the occupation in a sensible way and in light of the work done by DOS and CIA before the war would have produced a situation with much more stability and just as great profits for the corporations. Given how little military force has been available to send to Iraq, massive amounts of private security would always have been necessary, but without the civil war it would not have been nearly as expensive to the providers,s o greater profit could have been reaped. And If American companies are reaping any reward for Iraqi oil (which I'm not sure about), they would have been able to get a great deal more if they could actually get the oil out of the country in anything like an expeditious way. Iraq's oil exports are a fraction of what they would be in more stable circumstances.