Shoeless shuffle into jail

With all the recent laughter about shoes thrown at incumbent president Bush - not it seems as easy as shooting fish in a barrel - we should not forget the plight of the attacker now that the news has left the front-page. Hardly wielding lethal weapons, he has yet been bundled into prison and is awaiting trial. Plenty of Iraq war supporters feel compelled to mention that he would have been killed had he tried to do that to Saddam Hussein, but that's the whole point, he did this as an act of his freedom of expression - it may be 'ingratitude' but that's democracy for you, a pluralism of views. If such an act were committed in Britain, given that the boots missed the president, the offender would be hauled into a prison cell for the duration of the fly-in visit and then released with a ticking-off. Here in Iraq, they not only threaten him with a jail term of between two and seven years (whick smacks suspiciously of political persecution from a humiliated Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, pulling strings to intervene in the judicial system - some division of powers), but the security that bundled him off have handed out such a beaten that he had to go to hospital with a broken arm, broken ribs and facial injuries - hardly the sign of a mature, civilised democracy, unless you approve of 1970s and 80s policing in Britain. The democratisation process may have been forcibly fast-tracked in Iraq, but a thuggish culture of those in power still remains. So much for a flowering of human rights, that would be some compensation for all the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by Gulf War II and the millions traumatised, injured or displaced. Having shoes thrown at him is the least the US president deserved.