I’ll admit that it’s a bit unseemly to see a foreigner stand up at a press conference and hurl his two shoes at our president (even if our president is visiting his country). A small part of me feels a bit defensive about it. But I think the reason that I actually have a stronger feeling of satisfaction is best expressed by something Glenn Greenwald said on Bill Moyers’ Journal on Friday Night.
GLENN GREENWALD: You have. Let’s just quickly describe in the most dispassionate terms, as few of euphemisms, as possible, where we are and what has happened over the last eight years. We have a law in place that says it is a felony offense punishable by five years in prison or a $10,000 fine to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. We have laws in place that say that it is a felony punishable by decades in prison to subject detainees in our custody to treatment that violates the Geneva Conventions or that is inhumane or coercive.
We know that the president and his top aides have violated these laws. The facts are indisputable that they’ve done so. And yet as a country, as a political class, we’re deciding basically in unison that the president and our highest political officials are free to break the most serious laws that we have, that our citizens have enacted, with complete impunity, without consequences, without being held accountable under the law.
And when you juxtapose that with the fact that we are a country that has probably the most merciless criminal justice system on the planet when it comes to ordinary Americans. We imprison more of our population than any country in the world. We have less than five percent of the world’s population. And yet 25 percent almost of prisoners worldwide are inside the United States.
What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.
They have license to break the law. That’s what we’re deciding now as we say George Bush and his top advisors shouldn’t be investigated let alone prosecuted for the laws that we know that they’ve broken. And I can’t think of anything more damaging to our country because the rule of law is the lynchpin of everything we have.
If you take away my hope that George W. Bush will ever be held responsible for his crimes (and they are many), then I start to feel a deep sense of injustice and frustration. And I begin to feel like someone from the second-tier of our system of justice needs to make some sort of statement.
I totally agree with Glenn! I do think, however, that we will let this prez off the hook and we will will be forever remembered for this.
“I’ll admit that it’s a bit unseemly to see a foreigner stand up at a press conference and hurl his two shoes at our president (even if our president is visiting his country).“
In this case your president was the foreigner, not the fellow who hurled the shoes.
And you have a very interesting concept of the term “visiting”. Bush was not exactly a visitor there.
Actually, I am an American, and a non-American (foreigner) threw a shoe at my president. I don’t need correction on the obvious, especially when I pointed out that Bush was in the man’s country.
And, yes, Bush was visiting. He was a guest of the elected Iraqi government.
I would ask you to take a few breaths and stop bullying other posters on this site. You are insulting people and their intelligence for no good purpose.
Oh, come ON BooMan. As if the Iraqi make-believe government had any choice in the matter at all, and as if the Iraqi make-believe government in any way represents the Iraqi people and their wishes.
And by the way, they were most assuredly NOT elected. Maliki, in fact, was selected by the Bush regime, if you will recall, when the Parliament – the only part of the government that was in any way elected – chose someone who has not acceptable to them. Maliki was the choice of the Bush administration, not the Iraqis.
And I am sorry if I have appeared to be insulting people. I don’t mean to. On the other hand, maybe people should think about how some of their assumptions as Americans come across to others?
Believe me, Hurria, if the Americans had the ability to choose the winners of the Iraqi elections we never would have wound up with this coalition. Even if the Bushies had wanted him to win initially, Maliki would have been gone two years ago for general incompetence.
Maliki became prime minister in much the same way that Hamas won their elections. Our neo-cons are as stupid as stupid people come.
Nevertheless, it’s true that they probably couldn’t prevent Bush from visiting even if they wanted to.
But, what you consistently ignore is that as badly as the Iraqis want the Americans to leave, those in charge of security do not feel quite ready for that to happen. If they did, you never would have seen them pass the status agreement.
The Iraqi government is dependent on the Americans, but they were still elected. They aren’t make-believe. They are not there to do our bidding. If America’s foreign policy elite could install any government, that government would be Sunni, and hostile to Iran. In an ideal world (for our elites) the people of Iraq would actually vote for our preferred government. But they didn’t, they won’t, and they never will. That’s part of the bone-headedness of this whole enterprise. But the one thing the Iraqis did get out of this was a government much more reflective of their popular will than any that existed under the Ba’athists, or any that we would have installed by fiat.
I hope the next series of elections are better and result in a better reflection of the popular will. I hope Iraq continues to have elections long after the Americans are gone. I hope, one day, that Iraqis choose a better set of leaders than they have chosen so far.
I appreciate you bringing your perspective to things, but your perceptions are extremely defensive and sometimes disrespectful. I hope you know that the practice of slapping a statue with a shoe is incomprehensible to Americans until it is explained. For the same reason, throwing a shoe at a ‘foreign’ leader would never occur to an American.
I appreciate your civil comments. That does not mean, of course, that I agree with them all. Unfortunately, I am awake later than I should be (a chronic condition with me since I spent a good deal of time in communication with people on the other side of the earth), and so I will not try to make much of a response now. I will try tomorrow because I think there are some important points here.
Three items for now:
Even though Khalilzad rallied support against Jafari and in favor of Maliki, he was dealing with political realities never anticipated before the invasion. Hell, they’d never even heard of Sistani before the invasion. They thought they could install Chalabi and wash their hands of the country. And the government quickly soured on Maliki and debated removing him in a coup. Nevertheless, the felt powerless to do so, and Maliki was ultimately endorsed by the Dawa Party both as a compromise pick and, a year later, as their chairman.
May 14, 2007:
BooMan, your snippet from Juan Cole does not tell anything like the whole story, and in any case Juan Cole, with all due respect to him, is not even remotely the ultimate authority on Iraq. I believe he is completely sincere in his views, but he has never been to Iraq, is not in touch with it, and his analysis and views on Iraq are as a result more often than not significantly off the mark, and not just according to me.
Your last statement is interesting: ‘not just according to me’. So who else?, I’m curious.
Lots of people have disagreed with Juan Cole on Iraq starting from the beginning when he was in favor of the invasion for all the wrong reasons. They include scholars and analysts from all over the world, including most credible Iraqi scholars and analysts, journalists who have been deeply involved in Iraq, etc.
This is not to dis Juan Cole by any means. He is a good scholar, an extremely valuable resource for information, and a very decent human being, but he does not have the best insight on Iraq and Iraqis, and should not be taken as having the final word there.
It wasn’t an effort to tell the whole story, just to tell what it does, in fact, tell.
What it tells excludes critical context and gives an inaccurate impression of what actually happened.
Let me elaborate a bit on my second point. Bush was imposing his presence there as the conqueror, not “visiting” the country. In fac, in reality he never actually entered the country since he did not leave the imperial citadel commonly known as the Green Zone. I have visited and studied numerous such imperial citadels from previous eras, and there is no real difference between those and the green zone.
I’m curious exactly how many AMERICANS have had the chance to throw their shoes at Bush.
I’m trying to think when is the last time he spoke in front of the public that wasn’t hand-picked supporters.
Pax
Wouldn’t it be great if on the day he moved out of the White House the street was lined by Americans and others who would send him on his way in a hail of shoes?!
Or drag him off to face a fair trial followed by whatever penalty US law would indicate for his crimes?
Now THAT is my kind of fantasy!
I rather liked the symbolism of the streets being lined with people running up to the presidential limo and smacking it with their shoes. Perhaps that could happen on the way to the courts?
“If you take away my hope that George W. Bush will ever be held responsible for his crimes (and they are many), then I start to feel a deep sense of injustice and frustration.”
Wait a minute: you still have hope for that? Booman, step away from the bagful of airplane glue.
“…a bit unseemly to see a foreigner stand up at a press conference and hurl his two shoes at our president (even if our president is visiting his country)….”
Let’s not forget that this is the President of the country that is occupying said country.
Kevin Drum sez:
There’s some speculation ‘mongst our compatriots that the incident was a set-up (in order to showcase Iraqi freedom, I guess) — in which case the protest was basically meaningless.
In any case, it’s impossible for me to feel at all offended by an insult against an artificially installed figurehead.