Like many, I witnessed the footage of U.S. President Bush narrowly ducking a pair of shoes hurled towards him by a protesting Iraqi at a press conference. This desperate, futile gesture of shoe-throwing reveals not just one individual's statement of visceral loathing but in a sense, symbolizes how many others both in Iraq and around the world feel towards Bush even in the dying days of his presidency. It is quite telling and remarkable that a U.S. president could have so singularly, in eight short years, successfully alienated world opinion to the degree that a reporter, in the normally safe bubble zone of a press conference, is willing to part with his shoes to demonstrate this.
I won't miss the Bush presidency and believe it was a disastrous spell not just for the U.S. but for the globe, yet, despite the administration's use of outright fabrications and perversions of justice as a rationale for its invasion of Iraq, Bush might have had a point when he brushed off the incident by remarking how this kind of protest was normal in an open and democratic society -- inferring that Iraq had achieved some measurable form of democratic progress. Of course, it's very tempting to be cynical about anything that comes out of the mouth of this president and his platitudes about democracy are outweighed by the reality on the ground there. Yet, it has become far too easy to dismiss everything about the Bush presidency as a caricature of arrogance and villainy combined with gross ineptitude. Such was the divisive and controversial nature of the Bush administration that it polarized the U.S. and the world to such and extent that any of its remotely positive accomplishments were eclipsed by its obvious failures.
There was much discussion and speculation in the news media after the "shoe-ing" episode about how to throw one's shoe is a mark of ultimate contempt in Arab culture and this was followed-up by a recounting of how hundreds of Iraqis gathered around a lowering Saddam statue to hit it with their shoes. What's curious here is that had it not been for the ill-considered U.S. invasion, Saddam might have still been around today gassing minorities, jailing opposition and torturing anyone who got in his way -- and people would have most definitely kept their shoes on. If there was one thing that came out of this that could be construed as redeeming, it was the removal of a vicious tyrant who, although some argued was a contained threat, ran his government like a mafia and repeatedly and mercilessly suppressed and murdered his own people. I describe myself as anti-Bush for a host of considered reasons -- although unlike some, I don't lay awake at night seething with his visage in mind and I don't subscribe to some of the more hysterical strains of Bush-hating out there -- I wouldn't even go so far as to assign him the equivalency of a Hitler or a Saddam - much to the surprise of some in my own circles . I've heard people time and again associate Bush to this stellar cast of infamy and I find it inaccurate, historically-ignorant and giving Bush too much credit. Bush was no evil genius but an "employee" or a "front" for a clique of paranoid, power-hungry neo-cons. As much as neo-cons have shown their capacity for inhuman enterprises, they are a few degrees of a lesser evil than Hitler or Pol Pot.
While Bush's neo-con led foreign policy has resulted in high numbers of casualties both direct and indirect during these last eight years, it now appears that it is now - hopefully - on its way to becoming another discredited, morally-bankrupt ideology like Fascism or Communism. I don't think I can recall a president who was so ridiculed and reviled since Nixon. Opposition to Bush was persistent, vocal, furious and creative in both the U.S. and internationally. True enough that the administration smugly ignored world opinion to satisfy the interests of its oil lobby supporters, yet now reality has finally come home to the U.S. in the undesired dividends of body bags and soup lines and a disillusioned and angry public has spoken by electing Obama. It would have been vindication for many had an impeachment process guaranteed an earlier exit but such is the way things are when the weight of the system and its legal obfuscation are against you.
The shoes were a size ten which almost matches the percentage of the outgoing president's approval rating. All things considered, this president led a charmed presidency considering he could have been ducking a lot more than a pair of shoes.
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