When President George W. Bush made his surprise visit to Baghdad, every precaution was taken. Save one. As the President, Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki prepared to take questions, an Iraqi reporter, Muntadar al-Zeidi leveled his weapons, both size 10.  That President Bush was unharmed was more a product of his ability to dodge than al-Zeidi's aim. 

The moment will live on in comedy and politics for quite a while.  As Radley Balko, from whom the video loop was taken, says, it never gets old. My thought is that it should be repeated for each person who dies since America decided to free Iraq.

But shoes can't kill.  At least not this way.  What they can do is provide the only means for an angry man to express the depth of his outrage at life in his country.  From the AP:

This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

The best explanation for this preposterous attack is that al-Zeidi had few other options to express his anger and outrage.  One of the mantras used to trick a frightened America is that we must bring the war to the terrorists.  That means that we keep the fighting, and hence the pain, away from us.  Certainly that's better for us.  It's not necessary better for the people to whom we brought the war.

For those whose memory might be faulty, we were told that we would be greeted as saviors by the people of Iraq, oppressed by Saddam Hussein, who had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them.  All old news for us, but still very real to Iraqis.  This was not a mere political debate to those whose died as collateral damage in our war over there.  We were prepared to suffer their deaths.  Nobody asked them what they thought about the subject.  Muntadar al-Zeidi wanted President Bush to know how he felt on the subject.

Many Americans feel the same way about this war, though we do so without having suffered nearly as much pain as the Iraqi people.  We have lost many of our own.  Some believe it was "worth it" while others disagree.  But there's little denial, whether one is proud of America knowing that The Surge helped or saddened by the fact that we were compelled to surge to begin with.

"This great Arab shoe sums up the history of the criminal Bush, who is responsible for the loss of lives of hundreds of thousands of Islamic sons and who remained arrogant, spiteful and mean-spirited until the last moment of his term," wrote Abdel-Sattar Qassem, a political science professor at An Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus, on a Palestinian Web site.

One has to wonder whether this shoe attack, this basic expression of futile outrage, will be seen as a joke or the final commentary on a failure of American ideals and policy.  At Lowering the Bar, Kevin Underhill uses wit to make the point:

Rumors that a third shoe may have also been thrown from a nearby grassy knoll, which if true would implicate a second assailant and thus a possible conspiracy, were dismissed by White House officials.

Bush also played down the incident, saying, "All I can report is, it is a size ten."  That's a pretty good line, and I give the president credit for that, and for not automatically trying to link the shoe-thrower to al Qaeda. 

This ludicrous shoe attack may be the perfect closing strain of a presidency that might be viewed historically as ludicrous.  But it's not just an attack on George W. Bush, but on a nation that elected and supported him in this endeavor. 

According to the New York Times report, "[h]itting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq. It means that the target is even lower than the shoe."

If we stop, for a moment, subscribing to the foundational belief that America can do no wrong, maybe we all deserve a shoe in the head.  If nothing else, maybe it will knock some sense into us.

Update:  I have just heard that Muntadar al-Zeidi is being held for questioning.  What exactly are they asking him? 

Where did you get the shoes?
Why a shoe and not a sneaker?
When did you first wear size 10?
Are there other shoes in your closet?
Were you acting alone when you threw the shoes?

Does the claim that he is being questioned strike anyone else as reaching yet a new level of absurdity, just when you thought it wasn't possible?