MIDDLE EAST: President Bush and his strange safari

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

The Arab media is still assessing, mocking, analyzing, bemoaning and lampooning President Bush’s trip to the Middle East, which ended in Egypt last week. Years of vitriol over U.S. actions in the region have been unleashed in opinion pieces and political cartoons, including one that depicts Bush wearing an Israeli tie while holding up a peace sign with blood-drenched fingers. Another shows Bush racing with a bag of cash, symbolizing the weapons contracts he brought to the Gulf.

Much of the criticism is Arab columnists fuming about the U.S. while glossing over the corrupt and disastrous policies of their own governments. But some writers have conjured the past colonialism of the British and French to suggest that the West, especially this president, repeatedly fails to understand the region, choosing instead to buy it off with aid and contracts and promises. Or war. There are allusions to Napoleon and British occupiers. Under the headline, Bush’s Swan Song, Ayman El-Amir wrote about Bush’s trip in the current edition of Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly:

‘Judging by his meetings, reactions and statements, President Bush looks very much like a Western colonial ignorant on safari to a strange land, reading lines from some dubious travel guides written by his neo-con partners. What he will bring back is only a collection of strange photographs of exotic places and curious people, if he even pauses to reflect and look back. Before he knows it, the swan song will have been sung on his failed presidency.’

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo