One more time, the outgoing US President George W. Bush proved to the world that he was right. He has been saying out loud for years that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. We have not believed him and neither has the world. When his forces invaded Iraq and found none of the weapons he was talking about, we and the world mocked him. Yet, we have now seen how perspicacious he has been, as the latest press conference he held in Baghdad has proved the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That conference has indeed proven that these weapons are even more dangerous than we imagined, as they cannot be seen by metal detectors or any kind of searching. Moreover, contrary to nuclear bombs or chemical weapons, these new weapons can only be used in pair. This gives their owners two shots, as one may not be enough. I do not know why we did not think about the existence of such mortal weapon which Bush seems to have known all the time. It is not totally new in our history and if Bush has survived it, some people have instead died of it in the course of our history. This weapon has been devoted to kings and rulers before and some of them still deserve it. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, waved it in a famous UN meeting in the 1960s. Now, a new name has joined this list of kings and presidents, namely Iraqi journalist Muntazir al-Zaidi. Al-Zaidi, though, has joined another list, as well, more important and longer than the first one. In fact, it includes hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people who are standing against the US occupation, which has upset all human, cultural and legal values that Baghdad used to embody before the arrival of the Americans (such as the father of all laws Hammurabi, the Mesopotamian civilization and the Islamic Caliphate). Al-Zaidi has also started a new phase, as many security measures and rules in press conferences will now change. After Bush's press conference in Baghdad, for reasons unclear to the US press, the US administration announced that President Bush would not hold any new press conference in his remaining weeks in office, except in mosques. Meanwhile, in the US, Iraq and some other countries whose leaders followed Bush's policy, a frantic search has begun for the factories and warehouses of such weapons and so has the dismantlement of all these shoes of mass destruction. Newspapers report that US security services informed their Iraqi counterparts that during Bush's visit to Baghdad, they had noticed the existence of warehouses with these forbidden (by the US) weapons in all Iraqi mosques, both Sunni and Shiite. This proves that Muslims are terrorists, as President Bush has been saying. Secret US organs taking pictures from the Iraqi sky observed such warehouses in the places where people pray, even in governmental buildings, but the Iraqi government denied any responsibility and published the photos of its ministers barefoot and raising their feet in the air at their latest cabinet meeting. Bush was also right when he said at his latest press conference that such things happen in democratic societies. In fact, we have seen many officials and leaders in such societies being pelted with tomatoes, eggs or very creamy cakes. In those societies, though, the thrower is not tortured, does not receive broken ribs, is not sent to jail and is not told he or she would stay there for 50 years. President Bush has been telling us that he has brought freedom and democracy to Iraq. Now, al-Zaidi's destiny is what will prove whether the Iraqi society created by the US occupation is really free or whether it is a society of detentions, repression, persecution, torture and broken ribs.
