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Those shoes.....

Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq for many years. He is one of the few true journalists in the war-torn country. Interesting in all the hype surrounding the event - including the US seeking to make light of it - is the significance in the Arab world of the shoes being hurled, and even more particularly, what the reporter said at the time of the "throws".

He writes in The Independent:

"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."

Meanwhile, over at The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss writing in "Bush Finds WMDs in Iraq, Umm, or WMHs":

"President Bush finally found the long-missing Weapons of Mass Humiliation in Iraq. Iraqis, millions of them, are wearing them on their feet. Not exactly WMDs, but WMHs will have to do.
Unfortunately, Bush discovered the WMHs when a pair of them sailed past his head at a press conference in Baghdad. The hurler, Muntader al-Zaidi, is already a hero in Iraq, and beyond.
I hope I don't get in trouble with the Secret Service by saying that I, too, found satisfaction in the display of anger toward Bush, whose reckless war costs hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed an entire nation. What Zaidi did was to put an exclamation point on Bush's war, fittingly -- and, given the fact that the smoothly bipartisan, rancorless Barack Obama isn't likely to investigate the crimes of the Bush adminstration in Iraq, it might be all we get before Bush rides off into the Texas sunset."

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