The pair of black shoes, hurled at George W Bush by a young Iraqi journalist at a Baghdad press conference last Sunday, may be seen as a bitter verdict on Bush's colonial war in Iraq - and, indeed, on his entire presidency. Many harsh judgments of Bush's term of office have already been made, and more will undoubtedly follow. But none will have the stark, eye-catching impact of Muntazar Al-Zaidi's angry gesture, as he cursed the man he held responsible for the destruction of his country. ‘This is a goodbye kiss, you dog!' The Iraq war was flawed from the very beginning. After Al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the United States, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to teach the Arabs a lesson about American military power that they would never forget – even though there was no evidence whatsoever linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. In turn, Vice-President Dick Cheney had his eye on Iraq's vast oil reserves, and imagined that an invasion of Iraq would put that country and its assets firmly in America's orbit. But neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney could have carried America into war had it not been for the fervent advocacy and the fraudulent intelligence of the neo-conservatives – men like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Lewis ‘Scooter' Libby, among many others - who had risen to positions of power in both the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office. In pressing for an attack on Iraq, their motive was not only to make America safe, but also - and no doubt it was their first consideration - to improve Israel's strategic environment by removing any potential threat to it from the east. In the words of the American columnist Frank Rich, they were ‘the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretences.' The verdict of London's Financial Times (16 Dec) is devastating in its brevity: ‘The Bush Administration, on a false prospectus, broke the state of Iraq, scattered its middle classes across the Middle East, proliferated jihadism and uncorked a sectarian war that will haunt the region for a long time to come. By invading Iraq, it also made Iran a regional power.' A history of the Iraq war and its bloody aftermath has not yet been written, nor can it be for several more years, because no one can yet provide an accurate count of the hundreds of thousands of dead and of the vast material destruction. But one can safely predict that future generations will condemn the destruction of Iraq as one of the great crimes of the early twenty-first century. The lesson for the United States must surely be that the way to defeat the terrorists is not by waging wars or torturing suspects but by using all of America's assets - its ‘soft power' and its ‘hard power' - in order to resolve regional conflicts fairly. In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether President Bush, in his last days in office, will issue preemptive pardons to key officials, who served during his first and second terms of office, to protect them from future prosecution. They may need such protection because the evidence against them is overwhelming – as it is against President Bush himself. A bipartisan Senate report, issued on 11 Dec, accuses Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials – including Condoleezza Rice – of being directly responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prisons. It is the result of a two-year investigation conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee under the direction of Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, the former presidential candidate. Although the report remains confidential, a 29 page summary was made public. It states that the source of the CIA's resort to methods of ‘aggressive interrogation' of terrorist suspects lay in Bush's decision on 7 February 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners. This opened the door for water-boarding (simulation of drowning), nudity, tying prisoners in stress positions for long periods and, of course, ‘extraordinary rendition', that is to say the practice of sending prisoners abroad to be tortured in foreign countries on behalf of the United States. Another critical report - not yet published but circulating among top officials in Washington - is a 513-page history of America's lamentable yet highly-expensive failure at rebuilding Iraq after the devastation it caused in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Entitled Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, the report was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart Bowen, a Republican lawyer. It tells a shocking story of deception, waste and poor planning; of fighting between different US government agencies; and of the sheer impossibility of making progress with reconstruction in an environment of terrible violence. Tens of billions of dollars were squandered in the attempt – or were corruptly diverted into the pockets of Iraqi politicians and tribal chiefs. Now that America's attention is switching from Iraq to Afghanistan, will President-elect Barack Obama and his team avoid the blunders and crimes of the Bush era? Torture is to be banned, and Guantanamo closed. Extrajudicial rendition will be forbidden. The Iraq war will be gradually brought to an end and US troops withdrawn over the next two years. But Obama has vowed to root out Al-Qaeda from the tribal areas astride the Afghan-Pakistani border. An extra 15,000 to 20,000 US troops are to be sent to Afghanistan in a bid to quell the Taliban insurrection. It looks as if the US is allowing itself to be sucked into another unwinnable war, because it is highly doubtful that military force can ensure ‘victory' in Afghanistan for the US and its NATO allies. Most experts say that stability in Afghanistan can be achieved only (a) by negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, so as to bring about a ‘national reconciliation', and (b) by involving all of Afghanistan's neighbors, including Pakistan, India, China, the Central Asian states to the north - and Iran. Last Sunday, Bernard Kouchner, France's foreign minister, attempted just such an initiative by chairing a meeting in Paris of regional foreign ministers. Iran's foreign minister Manoushehr Mottaki was invited, but failed to attend. No doubt he wished to indicate Iran's displeasure at President Nicolas Sarkozy's remark that ‘It would be impossible for me to shake the hand of someone [he meant Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad] who dared say that Israel should be wiped off the map.' Nothing could better illustrate the way Middle East conflicts are inter-connected. The international community is now looking to Barack Obama to solve the Afghan conflict, as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict. It would be tragic if these conflicts were still raging four years from now, perhaps inciting an angry young Afghan or Palestinian to hurl his shoes at President Obama, seen as the slaughterer of his people, rather than the peace
