Two images from the news made an impression on me this week. The first was the toppling of the effigy of George W. Bush in Trafalgar Square, parodying the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad. And the second was a shot of a singed, shell-shocked donkey standing next to the improvised rocket launcher donkey-cart it had been forced to pull through Baghdad's streets. Both images are connected in a subtle way beyond the obvious references to the war in Iraq.

Bush is, by most accounts, the most powerful man in the world. This power does not emanate from any inherent qualities he possesses, but rather from the office to which he has been elected by a minority of Americans. It is perhaps not too far off the mark to suggest that when he and his administration embarked on their evangelical mission to subdue the forces of world evil, they suspected that they, and Bush in particular, would be lauded as heroic conquerors by the world population, particularly that of the Western world. It is therefore all the more striking that this all-powerful, would-be hero has been so symbolically shunned by this very population, with the added insult of the inevitable comparison made by the toppling of his effigy to the very evil he has been attempting to subdue.

In Iraq itself, the power of the all mighty US military is being severely tested and is gradually demonstrating itself as embarrassingly inadequate. The only time, that I can recall, of anyone going to battle on a donkey was Don Quixote. Yet, in a part of the world where innovation in military development created an all-powerful ancient civilization, where animals of war have included horses, camels and elephants, donkeys have become the latest innovation. Besides the perplexing problem of how a modern military force fights against an opposing force using medieval techniques, what strikes me in the image of the traumatized donkey is the ever-widening circle of innocents being caught up in the conflict. And it is a conflict in which the lines between good and evil are becoming increasingly blurred as the number of innocent casualties rises. In which would-be liberators are being fled from by those meant to welcome them.

It was reported that the four donkeys used in the Baghdad attacks survived the ordeal and are in the care of the US military, while George W. Bush is back in the care of his stable hands at the White House.

23 November 2003

Dion Marc Delport

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