Tue Dec 23, 2008
| Brought to Heel: The Grim Realities Behind Bush's Humiliation in Baghdad |
(This is a newly updated version of a post that was originally published on Dec. 15.)
We've all had good fun with the image of George W. Bush dodging the shoes flung at him by an angry Iraqi journalist this weekend – who rightly denounced the Crawford Caligula as a "dog" and a killer of Iraqi innocents – but now, as As'ad AbuKhalil notes, a more serious question arises: what will happen to Muntathar al Zaidi, the correspondent for Baghdadiyah Television, who, alone of all the journalists Bush has seen in the past eight years, had the courage to call him the murderer that he is?
After flinging the shoes at Bush – who ducked behind the protective hand of his puppet, Iraqi PM Nouri al Maliki – Zaidi was set upon by Iraqi security forces, who dragged him into a nearby room, where his cries could be heard for several minutes, as McClatchy reports. Later, a reporter for a television station run by Maliki's party said that Zaidi had been kicked and beaten until “he was crying like a woman," the New York Times reports. He's now being held in one of the Green Zone government's notorious prisons where the local goon squads, having learned from two stern masters – the Bush Family's old protégé Saddam Hussein and Bush's very own handcrafted torture program – subject detainees to horrible abuses. Zaidi's employers, who are based in Cairo, have called for his release, and up to 100 lawyers from across the Arab world have offered to defend him.
The incident has been played down in most of the corporate American press – especially Zaidi's motivation. The New York Times noted only that he had "bad feelings about the coalition forces," but of course gave no reasons why he might have such feelings. It's the same old "motiveless malignancy" that we are told drives every critic of American power – they are just "evil," or "extreme" or "unhinged," etc.; their reactions never have the slightest thing to do with U.S. policy. Yet McClatchy, as usual, digs deeper and reports that Zaidi had been especially affected by the American bombing of the thickly populated civilian areas of Baghdad's Sadr City during one of the brutal pacification operations of the "surge" earlier this year. As Juan Cole notes:
"The frequent US bombing of civilian Iraqi cities that are already under US military occupation has been one of the most under-reported stories of the Iraq War."
It has indeed. It is virtually an un-reported story in the mainstream press. This savage air campaign (a flagrant war crime, by the way; but of course in these days of "continuity," no one cares about that) was a key component of what Barack Obama has called the "success beyond our wildest dreams" of Bush's "surge" – along with the U.S. death squad operations that Establishment court scribe Bob Woodward was allowed to reveal earlier this year. Meanwhile, that "wild success" – which engendered a sense of "triumphalism" among Bush's entourage on the trip to Baghdad, the NY Times reports – has produced such a peaceful, stable situation that Bush had to sneak into Iraq's capital city (having sneaked out of America's capital city), where he was humiliated before the entire world…. more than five full years after he proclaimed "Mission accomplished." (If this is the type of "wild success" Obama envisions for his own promised Bush-like surge in Afghanistan, then the prez-elect better prepare himself for a taste of shoe leather on one of his future visits to Kabul, as one of our commenters here astutely noted yesterday.)
As for Zaidi, AbuKhalil asks another pertinent question: "Will those fancy Western journalistic associations now demand that he be released? Will they speak on his own behalf? Or will they now say that shoe throwing is a brand of terrorism and that the man should be shipped to Guantanamo?" No points for guessing the answer to that one.
AbuKhalil also notes that Zaidi is a leftist, although he will doubtless be portrayed as a typical "Muslim extremist" in the corporate press. Or rather, they will say nothing at all about his background and motivation, leaving their well-trained readers and viewers to assume that he is one of them dark and dastardly Islamofascist devils.
But he is not. Whatever else Zaidi may or may not be, in his action on Sunday he was simply a human being driven beyond all endurance by the sight of the man who was directly responsible for the scenes of carnage, suffering and despair that Zaidi has witnessed among his own people, year after year after year. He has also experienced it directly, having been kidnapped by unnamed forces in 2007 and beaten for two days while they questioned him about his journalistic work – the same kind of treatment he is doubtless receiving at the moment from the "sovereign" government of "liberated" Iraq.
It may be that the wide acclaim his insult of Bush has drawn across Iraq – where demonstrations for his release were held today – will protect Zaidi from the worst depredations of Bush's proxy torturers. We can only hope so – just as we hope that there will be many more who will follow his courageous example in the years to come, whenever and wherever Bush ventures out on a public platform.
UPDATE: The New York Times has some vox pop from around Iraq on local reactions to Zaidi's action. Although the corporate press in the West is still downplaying the incident, the symbolic significance of the gesture will be highly resonant around the world: an image of defiance on a par with the lone protestor standing before the tanks at Tiananmen Square.
UPDATE II (Dec. 23): The high-profile of Zaidi's action may have saved him from immediate execution, but he has apparently been tortured while in the custody of Iraq's liberated democratic strongman sectarian government, as MSNBC reports (via Angry Arab):
The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush says he would do it again and that he was forced to write a letter of apology after being tortured in jail, the journalist's brother claimed Monday....
The journalist's brother, Uday al-Zeidi, told The Associated Press that the letter was written against the journalist's will.
"He told me that he has no regret because of what he did and that he would do it again," Uday al-Zeidi said by telephone.
He said he visited his brother in jail on Sunday and found him with a missing tooth and cigarette burns on his ears. Muntadhar al-Zeidi told his brother that jailers also doused the journalist with cold water while he was naked, Uday al-Zeidi said....
"When I saw him yesterday, there were bruises on his face and body. He told me that they used an iron bar to hit him when they took him out of the press conference room. He told me that he began screaming and thought all those at the press conference would have heard his voice," he told AP Television News.
But you know what? Good American Liberals will tell you that Zaidi should be punished severely for his heinous crime. As Bernard Chazelle reports at A Tiny Revolution:
Donald Johnson linked to this comment by Rick Perlstein:Liberals should not make light of or license the physical assault on the leader of a sovereign state, no matter how much he's deservedly hated. This is not how we do politics, unless we're in favor something tending toward anarchy, or fascism.
This seems open and shut to me: the Iraqi journalist should go to jail for a rather long time.
Whenever a liberal "of impeccable credentials" shouts "long prison sentence!" I reach for my deconstruction toolkit. First, a rhetorical question: Should Marylin Klinghoffer, of Achille Lauro fame, have gone to jail for a rather long time after she spat in the faces of the terrorists who murdered her husband? After all, no one wants to make light of or license the physical assault on any man, no matter how much he's deservedly hated. This is not how we do justice, unless we're in favor of something tending toward anarchy, or fascism....
Perlstein speaks from the gut. His insistence on a long prison sentence is visceral. He feels violated by a bit of lese majeste, a touch of desacralization, and a pinch of blasphemy. The sentiment behind it is reflexive deference to authority. Many Americans just can't shake their royalist instincts. I see it in the classroom and on campus every day. I see it in sidewalk demos -- my working definition of a royal subject is someone who demonstrates against the war on the sidewalk but takes over the whole fucking street for the Annual fire department parade. I see it in the blind worship for the military. I see it every four years when the bloke-in-chief moves into his new quarters and it's Lady Diana getting married all over again (or buried again, depending on your political affiliation). The horses, the cannons, the flybys, the pageantry, the gravitas of Tom Brokaw. When you've been brainwashed with that sort of crap all your life, it's awfully tough throwing your Rockports at Dear Leader.