Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

An acquaintence of mine, Faisal Abbas, a very nice man and young journalist, is now contributing to the HuffPost.  In his day job, he’s the London-based editor of the Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat.  He just emailed me a link to his column on this story. He also interviewed Sy Hersh (one of my favorites) for his paper and they talked about this episode and Arab coverage of the U.S. in Iraq.

In his HuffPost piece, Faisal said

In my opinion, there is no question that there is a lot of anger towards America’s foreign policy and towards the Bush administration in particular, but one has to remember it is this same administration that made it possible for Iraqis to toss shoes at a president in the presence of an Iraqi Prime Minister.

If this had happened under Saddam, al-Zaidi’s would have failed to exist, let alone his Wikipedia page or Facebook groups.

And

let us not forget that when Baghdad was ‘liberated’ 5 years ago, Iraqis were beating pictures of Saddam, not Bush, with their shoes.

Point taken, Faisal. But what a price. Perhaps with President Obama we can begin to do good without the horrendous wrongs along the way.

Update: 1/29/09

In Iraq, the shoe incident becomes artwork.