BY PATRICK COCKBURN
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.
Periodically, reality would break in, such as the time a mortar
bomb exploded nearby the press conference hall at the very moment when UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was lauding security improvements, compelling him
to cower down behind a display of artificial flowers.
Visiting US politicians during the presidential election sought
determinedly to manicure what American television viewers would see. Diplomats
at the US embassy complained that staffers of Republican candidate, Senator John
McCain, had asked them not to wear helmets and body armour when standing next to
him in case these protective measures might appear to contradict his claim that
the US military was close to military victory. For similar reasons staffers of
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, demanded that the siren giving a seven- or
eight-second warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds to people in the Green
Zone be turned off during his visits.
I used to comfort myself with the thought that these official
visits did little harm even if they did no good. Iraqis were all too aware of
the grim reality of their lives to be taken in by official posturing. After five
years of war American voters have seen too many claims of success in Iraq
deflated by news of fresh slaughter to be deceived into thinking that the war
was being won.
In retrospect, I think I was overoptimistic: the foreign leaders
who visited the Green Zone or other US or British military camps came away with
the dangerous idea that they knew something about Iraq. They would depart, not
realising that the most important political fact was that the majority of Iraqis
detested the US-led occupation whatever they thought of Saddam Hussein. Even the
foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, widely seen as pro-American, called the
occupation "the mother of all mistakes". This explains the popular enthusiasm
for Mr Zaidi on display in Baghdad.
The history of the Iraqi occupation is now beginning to feel
like ancient history but it is relevant because the US and Britain are
committing elsewhere so many of the same mistakes as they did in Iraq. Just at
the moment when Mr Bush was dodging footwear in Baghdad, accompanied by the
Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, Gordon Brown was appearing with the
Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, in Islamabad.
Mr Zardari is seen as a weak leader, uncertain of what he should
do and with limited authority over the military. But, as in Iraq in the past,
his constant appearance besides visiting foreign dignitaries convinces
Pakistanis that he is a US puppet. The constant finger-wagging against Pakistan
by Mr Brown, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and others may do
something to encourage the Pakistani government to act against organisations
like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and its civilian arm, Jamaat-ud-Dawah. But it also
encourages a sense in Pakistan that it is being besieged, encircled by India to
the east and a pro-Indian Afghan government to the west. The US drone attacks on
Pakistani territory increase this fear of military encirclement.
One does not have to spend long in Pakistan to discover that
many Pakistanis, perhaps a majority, dislike the US more than they do India. It
is all very well for Mr Brown to call for "action not words" against terrorists
in Pakistan but this is a truly impossible task even if President Zardari were a
leader of real authority. The US and the Iraqi government, with vast resources
at their disposal, have failed to eliminate al-Qaeda in the heart of Baghdad
where there are regular suicide bomb attacks and assassinations.
I visited the Jamaat-ud-Dawah headquarters in Lahore just before
it was closed (December 12) and its members exuded confidence that nobody was
going to put them permanently out of business. State authority in Pakistan is
eroding by the day. In Peshawar, the city at the mouth of the Khyber pass
through which flow 75 per cent of supplies to western forces in Afghanistan,
several hundred well-armed gunmen have calmly taken over depots filled with US
military vehicles and burnt them to the ground.
At this point somebody is bound to suggest that Pakistan is a
failed state without realising that they are entering dangerous ground.
Foreign Policy magazine in Washington does an annual survey of supposedly
failed states in which Pakistan is ranked number nine in 2008. But a failed
state does not necessarily a mean a weak country or a society unable to defend
itself. It is precisely in such allegedly failed states as Lebanon, Somalia and
Iraq that the US has suffered its greatest foreign policy disasters over the
past quarter century.
One small lesson of the debacle in Iraq might be to cut back on
these official visits such as those by Mr Bush and Mr Brown on December 14. In
Islamabad, Mr Brown’s demand for a crackdown on terrorism makes any action taken
by the host government look as if it is cravenly acquiescing to a foreign power.
In Baghdad, Mr Bush could see for the first time in five years, in the shape of
a pair of shoes hurtling towards him, what so many Iraqis really think of him.
(Patrick Cockburn, an Irish journalist, is an experienced
commentator on Iraq and the author of several books on the country’s recent
history. This article was posted on counterpunch.org on December 16, 2008.)
Courtesy: CounterPunch; www.counterpunch.org