Shoes and shame

George W. Bush was humiliated to a magnitude, which no act could achieve. What the shoes did of a young journalist in Iraq, who hurled successively a pair, one Bush ducked and the other one hit the US national flag. Though a symbolic act, Bush will go down in history as the vanquished and most despised President of USA - the most powerful nation of the world. Strange are the ways of nemesis! Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down and shoes were thrown to hit the statue, but here in this case, Bush being a living entity saw for himself, as to what his doctrines of "awe and shock and preemption" ultimately resulted into. Iraqis have written a history as to how the Islamic Resistance Force, humbled the mightiest military force of USA, and augmented by its NATO allies. Bush's bullish predisposition has wrecked the world and made it barren of all moral values, and worst of all to bring such a shock to his country, which had relentlessly struggled to become the bastion of democracy - 'a City on the Hill'. It was no exaggeration. Great American stalwarts - Abraham Lincoln, F.D. Roosevelt, Jefferson, Wilson, J.F. Kennedy and others contributed to the glory of the country and George Bush squandered it through is immoral and disgraceful acts of coveting other's oil wealth.
As a foreign student (Fulbright scholar), I have had the privilege to be in USA for over four years and always envied how much freedom people inhaled every day. No cop ever asked an individual as to which country he belonged to. Only the immigration authorities were entitled to question the nationality of an individual. There was no discrimination in justice. Norms of truth and not taking recourse to lies for personal gains were practised by and large, in the academic institutions. For an example, I would like to cite a personal experience. In the graduate level course, there was a sessional exam in one of the subjects, I found that a very pretty girl who was a student in the class did not appear for the test. When I went back to my apartment, I just called her as to why she did not take the exam? The questions, I said to her were quite easy. Before I could tell what the questions were, she told me: "Please don't tell me the questions, as I have promised the teacher to take the same test tomorrow." It gave me a very pleasant shock. Unfortunately, she flunked the test, and had to quit the graduate programme.
The internalized values of 'truth', I thought was the hallmark of the American culture. Look at the contrast. Here is a girl in the graduate programme, who did not cheat in order to get through and was out of the institution, but the President of United States of America, a very formidable military and economic power, told blatant 'lies' in order to justify ruthless aggression on Iraq. There was no trace of weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq and yet without any moral qualms, he spoke lies, and also hoodwinked his own people that the attack on Iraq was in the interest of national security. That an American President would stoop so low as to base US foreign policy on concocted 'lies' is not only a matter of shame for him but for the entire nation.