Once again, the lame-duck president Bush proved that he was right. Years ago, he got tongue-fatigue stressing that Iraq harbors weapons of mass destruction. Neither we nor the rest of the world believed him. We mocked him when his troops invaded Iraq without finding the alleged weapons.
But recently we discovered how shrewd and far-sighted he is. In his latest press conference it was proven that Iraq actually has such weapons. It was proven also that these weapons are more dangerous than we can imagine, because they cannot be spotted by security bodies through metal detectors, sensors or even a security pat-down. Unlike nuclear bombs or chemical weapons, they are not launched one by one, but in pairs. So you get two chances to hit your target. As they say, it takes two to tango.
Common as they are in our society, we couldn’t imagine the existence of these weapons while Bush is fully aware of them. These lethal and destructive weapons are familiar in our history. If Bush survived such weapons, there are others who have been killed by them, like Mamluke Queen Shajarat Al-Durr. It is still fresh in our memory that this weapon is confined to kings and rulers. Yet there are many contemporary rulers who deserve to be hit with it.
This weapon was not newly-discovered by Bush, as the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev used it in the 60s at the notorious shoe-banging incident in a UN meeting.
Journalist Montazar Al-Zaidi’s name will not only be listed alongside kings and rulers, Shajarat Al-Durr and Nikita Khrushchev, but will be part of an infinitely more important list which includes thousands of Iraqis who resist the American occupation that violates all the human and legal values which Baghdad introduced to the world long before the United States of America ever came into being ranging from the Mesopotamian civilization to Islamic Baghdad.
Al-Zaidi will join another list for starting a new phase, as many security procedures and measures in press conferences will now change. After the press conference and for reasons not quite understood by the US press, the Bush administration announced that president Bush will not hold any press conference during his remaining weeks in an office but only in mosques. Meanwhile, the US, Iraq and other pro-American states started a frantic search for the warehouses and plants of weapons of mass destruction to dismantle them.
Newspapers reported that US security bodies advised their Iraqi counterparts that there are warehouses for these American-banned weapons at the entrance of all Iraqi mosques, whether Sunni or Shia, which proves what Bush has said about all Muslim sects are terrorists.
Adding insult to injury, US intelligence has taken bird’s eye pictures from the sky to monitor such warehouses at places of worship in civil service buildings. The Iraqi government denied any responsibility for publishing photos of the ministers raising their bare feet in the air at their latest cabinet meeting.
One more time, Bush was right when he declared in his latest conference that those incidents are natural in free democratic societies. We have already witnessed many top officials and leaders in such societies receiving similar missiles in the form of tomatoes, eggs or cream cakes. However, in those societies the attackers are not tortured or sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Since Bush continues to remind us that he has brought freedom and democracy to Iraq, Al-Zaidi’s destiny is what will prove whether the US-formatted Iraqi society is really free or whether it is a society of detention, repression, persecution, torture and broken ribs.
Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
