President Bush made a suprise visit to Iraq today. He said the war is not over, but "it is decisively on its way to being won."
As the two leaders shook hands in Maliki's private office, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the US president, shouting: "It is the farewell kiss, you dog." Bush was not struck.
Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue's face with their soles.
But his appearance at a news conference here was interrupted by a man, apparently a journalist, who leaped to his feet and threw one shoe at the president, who ducked and narrowly missed being struck. Chaos ensued. He threw a second shoe, which also narrowly missed Mr. Bush. The man was roughly 12 feet from the lectern in the center of two rows of chairs, about two feet from a pool of reporters. A scrum of security agents descended on the man and wrestled him, first to the floor and then out of the ornate room where the news conference was taking place.
The president was uninjured and brushed off the incident. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said jokingly. An Iraqi accompanying the pool of reporters said the man had shouted, “This is a farewell kiss, dog.”
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
....By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.
Some music for the arrested reporter who undoubtedly is not going to have a pleasant stay in custody: Paul Simon and Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes:
