The New Nation - Internet Edition

Aijaz Zaka Syed

A ponderous academic debate has broken out over the shoe-ting incident involving US President George W Bush. After the initial shock and awe that the rage of Montader al Zaidi brought out in all of us, just about everyone in the Middle East -- including fellow journalists and writers -- is furiously debating if the Iraqi journalist was right to throw those size 10 shoes at the world's most powerful man.

Some of these well meaning voices have perhaps rightly argued that throwing shoes at guests does not go well with the Arab and Islamic tradition of honoring one's guests. But I am not so sure.

Call me a cynic but I find this talk of great Arab and Islamic traditions in relation to the leaders of the coalition of the willing a little absurd after what they have visited on the Arab and Muslim world.

Recall those searing images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- that heap of naked bodies, grown up men cowering like terrified kids with hungry dogs on their heels and then let's ask ourselves if that shoe slur was appropriate or not.

Even as some of us feel chucking shoes at visiting heads of state is not the most ideal form of journalism or registering one's protest, you've got to concede that even a million pair of shoes cannot ever recompense for what the people of Iraq have undergone under the US occupation.

Even as a lame duck president was busy dodging shoes in Baghdad last week, a report by the US Senate's Armed Services Committee stunned the Americans by revealing that the top administration officials including the president himself were not only aware of the widespread human rights abuses and torture over the past eight years but sanctioned them.

The Senate bipartisan report concludes that the Abu Ghraib abuse was not just the result of a few rogue soldiers: "Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody."

The Senate report outlines how Rumsfeld and other top officials rejected warnings from the Pentagon's own lawyers that torture and abuse were not only against the US and international law, they were also strategic blunders of the first order.

So from the abuse of detainees in the US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan to the persecution of hundreds of faceless prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba for seven years to CIA's inventive torture methods and abduction of innocent, helpless people from around the world, the corruption went right up to the top.

The Senate report, which has been largely ignored by a media weary of war and preoccupied with falling markets and failing auto giants, traces the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay crimes right back to the Pentagon, to the defense secretary and to the president himself. They cannot be explained as solitary actions of a few 'bad apples.' Seems the whole basket had gone to rot.

To give this administration its due, it's not exactly bending over backwards to 'explain' or apologize for all that has been going on over the past eight years.

In his interviews with ABC and Fox News over the past week, Vice-President Dick Cheney has magnanimously acknowledged he personally sanctioned all the controversial policies of this administration -- from the torture of detainees to CIA's rendition flights that picked up 'usual suspects' from around the world without the knowledge of their families and governments to dump them down the bottomless holes like the Gitmo.

The man described as the "most dangerous Vice-President in the US history" by the incoming vice-president Joe Biden is far from apologetic about this legacy. In fact, he has the audacity to call for keeping the Guantanamo Bay gulag open as long as the US war of terror is on. Which of course he wants the US to wage as long as it takes.

Asked whether waterboarding, CIA's now legendary way of getting to know its victims, was an appropriate technique of interrogation, the reclusive man rightly seen as the real power behind the throne, said with a straight face: 'I do'.

Faced with this intransigence, do you really think the Arabs should be embarrassed or apologetic over the actions of a lone Iraqi journalist who for years watched and experienced firsthand the incredible "blessings of democracy and free society" gifted by Bush and company talk about and couldn't take it anymore? Especially when there's little hope or possibility of any retribution whatsoever for those who visited these appalling crimes on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan!

In fact, there's talk of Bush possibly handing out blanket pardons providing immunity to those responsible for bringing shame and disgrace to America discrediting it in the eyes of the world. If that is done, it would not just be a travesty of justice but an outrage against America's own ideals and values that are enshrined in its Constitution and admired by the rest of the world.

When the Americans overwhelmingly voted for a "skinny black guy with a funny name" in the historic presidential elections last month, the world celebrated with them.

Because in choosing a black man for the White House, son of a Kenyan Muslim father at that, the Americans seemed to vote for a better world and change in every sense of the word. A world decidedly and starkly different from the one represented by the Bushes and Cheneys. A world inspired by hope and based on justice, fair play and mutual respect.

I know the incoming administration of Barack Obama will have its hands full what with the mind-boggling mess that his predecessor leaves behind on all fronts, chiefly on economic front.

In all likelihood, the Democrats would be loath to disturb the ghosts of the Republican past.

But if America really wants to move on from the neocon legacy and reclaim its standing in the world as the great democracy that it once was, it will have to hold to account all those who sent a million people to their deaths and destroyed a great civilisation for nothing.

Bush might have successfully dodged those wayward Iraqi shoes -- he's a great dodger, you've got to give it to him! - but those who gave the world Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and invented words like 'waterboarding' and 'extraordinary rendition' should not be allowed to escape accountability. Now is not the time to let sleeping dogs lie.