The Sole of a Nation

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, December 15, 2008

Reality made a dramatic cameo appearance when President Bush's legacy tour touched down in Baghdad yesterday and a shoe-hurling Iraqi journalist refused to go along with the charade that the invasion of his country was something to celebrate.

Bush, as part of his series of carefully choreographed farewell statements, has been making every effort to suggest that victory is around the corner in the two unfinished wars he leaves behind him (one undertaken under false pretenses, both vastly more protracted and costly than expected). The implicit message is that if anything goes wrong from this point forward, it will be Barack Obama's fault.

But yesterday, one rebellious Iraqi reporter -- and two flying items of footwear -- punctured Bush's historical revisionism and offered a powerful metaphor for the counter-argument that the war was a disastrous mistake and is far from over.

Indeed, the White House spin on Iraq falls apart under close analysis. The security situation is undoubtedly improved over two years ago, but the fact that Iraqis aren't currently engaged in a massive bloodletting is a pretty low standard for success. There are few signs of genuine political reconciliation. And despite Bush's insistence yesterday that the war "is decisively on its way to being won," if victory means a peaceful, secular, democratic and pro-Western Iraq, we aren't necessarily close at all.

(More here.)