MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti correspondent Pyotr Romanov)
I think that George W. Bush will remember forever the boots hurled at his head. It is important how one steps down. If rotten tomatoes are thrown at you, you must have been a failure.
Bush's curious slips of the tongue, goofs, and mistakes are enough for several publications but they are not so devastating. During his presidency, Ronald Reagan also made a lot of stupid statements, but Americans remember him as a good president. I do not understand why but they must know better.
The outgoing U.S. president will not follow Reagan's example. Regrettably, too often he acted like a teenager, with whom adults would play king of the mountain. Naturally, the adults gave in, and the teenager climbed to the top, feeling great because he was infantile. In effect, for eight years the Oval Office has become a teenage playground. This would have been all right if the Oval Office's host was not a U.S. president for whom the American dream entitled him to do whatever he wanted with his homeland and many other countries. Lack of political maturity makes it a risky game.
I think that Bush was persuaded to slow down when he went overboard, but the great American dream and the imagined Anglo-Saxon mission of civilizing the rest of the world give one enough leeway for unrestrained fancy and dubious deeds. Bush sincerely believed in both and trusted his closest aides like the indispensable Condoleezza Rice.
In short, Bush can hardly be compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sometimes, America was lucky and got a great president.
It may have been only an American problem if Bush had been limited to his teenage playground, but the problem is that he also played on the world arena. Step dancing abroad, he caused severe pain.
Needless to say, Iraq was the hardest hit during his second term. It is easy to understand why. First, Bush Jr. remembered the country's name from his father's fight there. Second, he was upset that guests at the Baghdad-based Al-Rashid hotel kept walking on his father's unflattering mosaic portrait. The then Iraqi government was trying to humiliate America. Bush felt hurt and many Arabs were gloating at him over their stupid trick.
However, even such an open challenge was not enough for the United States to invade a sovereign country. When Bush was told about it, he got upset, and an upset king is always a big headache for his court.
An excuse was eventually found with a concerted effort. It wasn't really plausible but nobody tried to persuade the world with serious arguments. The aim was to convince the upset president and his compatriots. This was not so difficult. Many of them still believe that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Bush's associates thought Iraq was a great idea because they could kill many birds with one stone. It provided an opportunity for the military-industrial complex (and, importantly, for the middlemen) to make more money; get rid of the once friendly and the now unfriendly Saddam Hussein; scare the Christian world with weapons of mass destruction in Muslim hands; and show contempt for the ageing UN, which had long irritated America's energetic diplomacy.
Finally, many thought that this idea would enable them to destroy the nest of terrorism, build an oil platform, a symbol of a liberal economy, on its ruins, and establish a parliament, a symbol of democracy, under a strictly Western pattern. In other words, the idea was part and parcel of the afore-mentioned U.S. mission - to establish the Anglo-Saxon market and the Anglo-Saxon democracy all over the world.
We know the results: hundreds of thousands of corpses, with one killed terrorist VS one American life and a thousand civilian lives; gallows for Hussein (his execution was shown by all of the world's highly moral television channels); tortures in the Abu Ghraib prison; glaring violation of international law, and this never-ending search for the weapons of mass destruction. Instead of the dollar-producing oil platform, Baghdad received a green "security belt," within which something is always burning or exploding. Instead of a democratic parliament, Iraq got a puppet regime which sits on U.S. bayonets, feigning lack of pain.
This is why shoes were hurled at President Bush. Luckily, he managed to dodge the blow just as a dexterous teenager might, although he did not expect Iraqi democracy to be so ungrateful.
The only hope now is that the new president will not pull the troops out of Iraq with the same haste with which his predecessor brought them there. If he does, everything will go down the drain in a hurry, both the puppet regime and Iraqi democracy. The country will be plunged into bloody chaos which nobody, except deranged Islamic fundamentalists, needs.
I do not mean to offend the Islamists. Regardless of faith, ideology, and the loftiest missions and dreams, all fundamentalists in this world are deranged. Incidentally, the great dream of universal Anglo-Saxon democracy also fits this category, if taken too seriously.
I do not remember an American president as unlucky as Bush. It seems that all the forces of the world and outside it conspired to upset him. Some journalists even blame him for the world economic crisis although it is clear that his knowledge of the economy is the same as that of geography, and he has demonstrated more than once that it is zero. It took the current crisis a long time to brew under the close watch of the great American gurus from Wall Street. It would be unfair to accuse Bush of this crisis. It is like blaming him for the bad genes, as if he engineered his own birth in a tube.
Look at how he responded to the hurling of shoes: "And it was amusing. I mean, I've seen a lot of weird things during my presidency and this may rank up there as one of the weirdest."
He thinks this is one of the weirdest things he has seen. Indeed, Bush has presented this journalist with democracy, and the latter threw shoes at him. At least, the U.S. president was quick enough to dodge the attack. He explained that democracy exists to allow everyone to throw shoes. Indeed, what else is it for?
The Financial Times made the unflattering remark that Bush never got it. But why expect him to become a think tank all of a sudden?
To sum up, I feel very sorry for Bush. He made a lot of dream bubbles - a democratic Iraq, a democratic Georgia, a democratic Ukraine, and a permanent peace in the Middle East. If he were not held back, he might have started introducing democracy in Iran.
Also, he was cheated at every step. Mikheil Saakashvili addressed him with admiration in Tbilisi, and his compatriots clapped their hands, listening with awe to what he was telling them.
I am sure that Bush was dreaming of putting all these dream bubbles on his last Christmas tree in the White House, unaware that they would burst in his face. Nobody from his entourage warned him that this is what always happens with bubbles.
To be honest, I do not even know what Bush is good at. He even fell from a bicycle several times. Maybe, having left the White House, he will learn to make paper cranes like they do in Japan. Once he makes a thousand of them, he can live a long and happy life.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
