Bad Show: Bush’s Appearance on Arab TV

By Anna Ghonim

In order to try to defuse the outrage in the Arab world over the torture pictures taken at the Abu Ghraib prison, President Bush made the unprecedented step of deciding to address Arabs directly on the US Government-sponsored channel “TV Hurra” as well as one of the most widely watched Arabic news channels, “Al Arabiyya.” I was watching Al Arabiyya yesterday when he came on at about 7:00 pm Cairo time.

The broadcast was run entirely in English, and for some odd reason there were no subtitles. Strangely, there was no simultaneous translation either. After the broadcast, the network anchor tried to paraphrase the main points made by Bush but did a horrible job of it. So the first point I have to make is that this was done really sloppily by someone – and most Arabs would not have understood it completely as their English is less than 100% fluent, although they might have gotten the gist of some of Bush’s answers to questions.

Bush started out by trying to convey the horror and shock he and all Americans felt by the pictures. He admitted that they were real and not “alleged” (that the pictures didn’t lie). So far so good. It was downhill from there.

First, he began talking about how America was an open society and that the whole world would be able to watch as the investigation was conducted in a totally transparent fashion. The way he said this was that he kept reiterating that “our” society is “free” (the obvious subtext is that “yours” is not) and that “ours” is open (yours isn’t). Basically, you came away with a strong impression that he feels this is a chance to extol American society over others, which came across to me as pretentious, condescending and just plain tasteless given the enormity of the crime he was supposed to be addressing (which was, after all, committed by people from this great open free society). This is not to mention the obvious subtext (or at least obvious to Americans) that he does not conduct investigations openly (9/11 anyone?), so this whole statement is not based on any precedent set by him.

Then he got progressively weirder. Asked about the sovereignty issue and the handover on June 30, he kept reiterating that Iraqis would be in charge and the US was there to “help”. (Help. OK, that is one word for what the US is doing in Iraq but maybe not the best.) He also started repeating the word “democracy” and made the amazing statement that “you know, the democracy in Iraq does not necessarily have to look like America.” (What should it look like and how do you define democracy, he has not said.)

Then he started listing the justifications for the war that have all been proved false. Apparently he is the only person, even in his own administration that is still convinced of them. It was like seeing a delusional person. He said Saddam was planning to acquire WMDs (arguably false but in any case this is a shifted goalpost—we went to war because he already supposedly HAD them), that he had tortured/gassed his own people (true, but irrelevant, and never considered a real reason to invade), and that he supported international terrorism (false, at least for the past several years). When the interviewer tried to pin him down to tie 9/11 to Iraq, he just repeated that 9/11 was horrible and these people started a war and we are going to hunt them down. He even used this as a campaign moment saying something like “as long as I am president we will be hunting them down,” as if John Kerry would cease to look for Bin Laden.

He continued to insist that the resistance in Iraq is foreign (when everyone else now knows it’s not; again he seems really, utterly delusional) and said pedantically that Iraqis are tired of foreign involvement in their country (meaning foreign fighters, but apparently oblivious to the fact that the American occupation forces constitute foreign involvement as well).

He also made a very bizarre comment when asked about how the US should handle Muqtada Al-Sadr. He stated that Iraqis are tired of him (Al-Sadr) because he is “occupying” a holy site that is important to Iraqis. Who is Bush to speak for Iraqi public opinion? How incredible is it that he says Iraqis are offended by a religious leader defending the country against foreign occupation from his religious headquarters? This came across as an incredibly arrogant statement.

That was about it. The man asked a final question on the Palestinian issue but it was abruptly cut off. (The White House transcript has it, but Al Arabiya cut the link abruptly so it was not carried on TV.) As I said, there was no attempt during the broadcast to translate. Some observers have said that Bush did this as a sort of strategy to address Americans—“See, I am trying to reach out”—but there was no reason that I can figure to actually impede Arabs from understanding his message. After all, I am now pretty convinced that Bush does not realize how bad all of these arguments sounded, and particularly coming from him.

Anna Ghonim is an American Muslim woman living in Cairo.