If the shoes fits . . .

IF only President Bush had consulted a fairy godmother before he embarked on his final visit to Iraq. He might have been warned that instead of losing a glass slipper, he would be receiving a used shoe.
The presidency of any country contains all the ingredients of a fairy tale. The central figure is supposed to overcome all odds and adversities, battle on behalf of righteousness, destroy demons and vanquish ogres, restore order in the world, provide reassurance that nothing untoward will ever happen again, and then retire and live happily ever after.
That is what Aesop, the Grimm Brothers and J.K. Rowlings, have always led us to believe. Like us, our children have grown up in a magical world, in which right always prevails over wrong, and conflicts and wars are justifiable because they restore social order and equilibrium.
One wonders which bedtime fairy tales Mrs. Barbara Bush had read to her son -- George W. Bush. It is obvious that at some time during the night, somewhere in the laboratory of his fermenting mind, the experiment went horribly awry. As a result, today, Iraqis and non-Iraqis alike are being made to suffer the consequences.
President Bush blundered into Iraq, relying on intelligence that was "flawed." Unlike President Kennedy, who lost his innocence over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba and then wept for having relied on his errant military advisers, Bush has not wasted a tear either on his misadventure or over the damage caused by it.
Ordinarily, persons with blood on their hands rarely revisit the scene of their crime. Did Bush seriously imagine that his visit to Iraq would be welcomed as a last hurrah, an opportunity for an avuncular valedictory address by a victorious Caesar to an audience that had been cowed into grinning submission?
Had he forgotten that the Iraqis had celebrated the demolition of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square by beating it with shoes?
Did he believe that Iraqis would feel grateful that in place of Saddam Hussein and his iron-brained militia, they now have the steel frame of 150,000 US troops underwriting their fledgling democracy?
Had he been deluded by his own propaganda? In 2003, President Bush told his troops: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, US and our allies have prevailed." Five years later, he professed the same optimism, with diminished conviction: "The war is not over, but it is decisively on its way to being won."
Bush could have done worse than to have read Winston Churchill's wartime speeches before he left for Iraq. He might have understood why many Iraqis find less comfort in his own fading reassurances than they do in the defiant words of Winston Churchill.
Harassed by German onslaughts and a wavering French government, Churchill addressed the Canadian Parliament in 1941. He quoted the advice given to the then French prime minister by his timorous generals, that "in three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Churchill added laconically: "Some chicken; some neck."
Iraq's neck has been stretched for over five years already, and may well be elongated for as long a period again. Whatever may be the crucial determinants that hasten the end of a war, they are not visible at the moment. Over 4,200 American lives have been lost. No one has the time to calculate how many Iraqis have been displaced -- a hundred thousand? More than million?
The cost of the war is also not the tourniquet. Over $570 billion have been spent already. With US economy in a state of recession, the last jobs president-eject Bush and president-elect Obama will want to touch will be those of America's Military Inc.
That might explain why Obama has chosen to include key components of Bush's national security team in his own administration. To many -- and they are not all necessarily Iraqis -- who had hoped to witness a change in US policies, the continuity of the same faces signals, instead, a linear persistence.
For the 170 million in Pakistan, life has never been a fairy tale. Our frogs do not transform into coachmen, our rodents do not become footmen, and our undersized pumpkins do not balloon into golden coaches. Most importantly, our fairy godmother has changed gender. Our former fairy godfather is paying more attention to our step-sisters than to us.
Living in a world of one's making is challenge enough; living in a world of someone else's making is even more difficult. Living in a world of our own make-believe is unforgivable. As the juggernaut of the war against terrorism moves inexorably towards and across our frontiers, we need to remind ourselves that fairy-tales are the product of peace-time tranquility. War spawns its own stories, in which the footwear is not a glass slipper, not even a size 10 shoe, but a hob-nailed boot.

F.S. Aijazuddin is a Pakistani journalist and author.