Shoes, and other striking images

Those shoes will now define what’s likely to be Bush’s last trip to the Iraqi capitol as Commander in Chief. This professor says this was only thing shown about press conference on many news networks and in that sense it functions as a counterpart to things like the toppling of the Saddam statue and the Mission Accomplished banner. Indeed this isn’t the first time the War in Iraq has been reduced to iconic images. This analyst says the Abu Ghraib photos are the iconic images of the War in Iraq, and they’ve always undercut the message coming out of Washington. But he says the video of the Iraqi journalist is different because it’s an Iraqi choosing to perform a gesture of defiance. This analyst says the power of the shoes in flight is hard to deny and the next administration will have its hands full reestablishing effective diplomacy in Iraq. But today all the talk is about the flying shoes and the anger that propelled them. This analyst says if the journalist had hit Bush it’d be a very different story, one of violence rather than a violent gesture and there might’ve been physical consequences for both men and it was Bush’s ability to duck that has made this imagery so powerful.