Obama gave Bush the Boot but the Cherry on top was the Shoe

by Felix Ngasama

Poor George BushGeorge Bush, Obama gave him the boot .... and now he gets the shoe from an angry Iraqi journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi.

Typical of a politician, Bush ducked and dived successfully when the angry Iraqi threw shoes at him during a press conference.

Americans attack their enemies from a safe distance using smart bombs and inter-continental ballistic missiles because they are scared of engaging the enemy in a face-to-face dogfight.

Since the US humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War at the hands of the Vietcong - a ragtag Southern Vietnam communist insurgency - while fighting on the side of Southern Vietnam during its war against the communist North, the Americans have worked very hard to prevent such shame and disgrace befalling them again by developing smart bombs and long-range missiles to strike the enemy from a distance.

Arabs are however suicidal, deadly creative and use anything at their disposal as weapons with which to take the fight to their American enemy and her allies. Even if some of the attacks are merely mischievous and without casualties or fatalities as in this case, they score highly on the psychological front.

This incident was another example where the American Secret Service ineptitude was embarrassingly exposed by the Arabs. Bush was under ‘shoe attack' and his Secret Service agents were caught napping and for a moment they seemed to have had their priorities wrong. First of all it took them too long to spring into action to protect the president. Secondly they prioritised catching the attacker instead of protecting the president first and foremost.

By the time a secret service agent rushed to protect Bush, the president had already assessed the situation and realised that his life was not in danger as indicated by his hand signalling the agent to stop.

Before George Bush and the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-MalikiNuri al-Maliki started the press conference, the US Secret Service agents must have carried out a thorough security check of the venue. I don't know whether they scanned or body searched the press conference attendants but whatever they did, they must have ensured that no individual had any weapon on them.

But history shows that Arabs have outwitted and embarrassed Americans a few times with Osama bin LadenOsama bin Laden's dispatch of unarmed Arab terrorists on American soil to use the US's own commercial aircraft as weapons to destroy and flatten the World Trade Centre as a classic example.

The US Secret Service agents had satisfied themselves that everyone who had entered the hall to attend the press conference had no weapons on them but, surprise, surprise, an Arab used his own (supposedly harmless) shoes to attack the president.

The problem with Americans is that they ignore and shrug off basic science and concentrate on sophisticated security and defence mechanisms.

Arabs on the other hand know that the way to fight and humiliate their advanced and sophisticated enemy is not by striving to beat her at her sophistication but by simply going back to basic principles. Basic science tells us that a shoe is footwear if worn as part of one's attire but it becomes a weapon if used as a missile to attack someone as it happened in this case.

There is an African folklore about the ant that killed the elephant. The ant knew that it only had to sting its giant enemy on its trunk and cause an unbearable itching sensation. The ant's sting itched so much that the elephant tried to scratch by violently whacking its trunk on the trees and battering itself to death in the process.

The US needs to learn and acknowledge that just as the American dream is wrapped up in a great American hype which says, "in America all things are possible", so are all things weapons with Arabs in their anti-American conflict.

The US should never be complacent in the presence of its Middle East enemies. Whether armed or not they have proved capable of pulling off dangerous and previously unheard of feats like the invasion of the US embassy in Iran by unarmed university students in 1979 and taking the embassy building with its American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days.

Iranians may not be Arabs but one needs to go academic to distinguish between them and their Arab cousins considering that they almost look alike with similar culture, religion and share their hatred of the US in equal measure. Needless to say they use the same means of fighting against their common enemy.

Americans and the rest of the West may see Arabs and others from the far Middle East as dishevelled clowns rooted in ancient tradition and therefore an unsophisticated lot. But it must be noted that while Americans are into hyped and eye-popping creative wizardly, Arabs on the other hand have quietly and creatively come up with simple but exceptional means to humiliate their sophisticated foe.

It is not hard to imagine American security and secret service experts concluding their reaction to an Arab attack pensively and asking themselves, "Why did we not think of that to prevent this?"

Luckily for Bush he is still agile enough at 62 to duck from a ‘short-range missile'.

What may seem harmless and therefore ignored as such by the US could just be a deadly weapon of mass destruction by Arabs.

Who knows, may be Iraq did indeed have weapons of mass destruction but not the type known by the West. Arabs have proved that anything - beyond the West's wildest imagination - can be a weapon.

Saddam HusseinSaddam Hussein's military experts and scientists who assisted the UN inspection team must have gone back to him reporting in between jokes and laughs about how the UN inspectors saw and passed by weapons of mass destruction without realising it.

Remember, after combing and raking through Iraq for 5 months (November 2002 - March 2003), the UN concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Really?