Boosh

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not a big fan of our current president. I recently heard an interview on Fresh Air that mentioned Bush in two very different ways. Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prizing winning journalist and a foreign corespondent for the Chicago Tribune. He wrote the fascinating cover story for the April edition of National Geographic about the Sahel region in Africa.

Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.

While he was working on the story Salopek, his interpreter, and his driver were taken captive by pro-government guerrillas in Darfur. They were then traded to the Sudanese Army for a box of uniforms. Before being captured, Salopek had an interesting encountered with a refugee in Chad who had named his son George Bush.

My journey began among refugees in eastern Chad. This is where I met George Bush’s father.

Bush tyrannized his family’s small plot of sand. He threw his mother’s battered dishes to the ground, pulled on visitors’ noses, and scampered away giggling. He got away with this because he was an only son. His elder sister, age four, despised him. Bush was fat-cheeked and two. “Boosh!” the refugees cooed. “Boosh-ka!” He was clearly a great camp favorite. This was in the Gaga settlement, where more than 7,000 Darfuris lived and died under UN canvas.

“Only George Bush can stop the Arabs in our land,” said Bush’s papa, Ahmed Juma Abakar. He corralled the boy in his lap. “When he grows up, he will help kill them.”

Multiple lines of identity were braided through Abakar. He was a coffee-colored African with a puff of white hair on his chin. He was a Masalit, a member of one of the African farming tribes driven out of Darfur at gunpoint by the janjaweed, the Arab nomads armed by the Arab-dominated government of Sudan. He detested Arabs. Yet he himself spoke Arabic. He also served sugary tea in shot glasses like an Arab, wore a white Arabic robe, and prayed five times a day toward Mecca. I, too, find this puzzling.

This Muslim man admires our president enough to name his son for a man that a significant portion of the Muslim world believes has been engaged in an anti-Islam crusade. This refugee, however, does not consider the president to be anti-Islam as much as anti-Arab. In the interview on Fresh Air, Salopek mentioned that this man believes that the president also had done more to help black African than any other world leader. I suppose there is some support to both the anti-Arab and the pro-black African opinions of Bush. I've written before about Bush's actions in Africa, largely drawing on Nicholas Kristof's reporting.

The other reference to our president was not nearly so positive. After being turned over to the Sudanese army, the three were brought to the capital of North Darfur. They were held in a secret prison without any access to their various embassies.

I was protesting my being held separately, in solitary confinement. I resumed eating on the eighth day when the guards informed me they would force-feed me through a rubber tube. “Like Guantanamo,” they said.

It turns out that there are several Sudanese men, including a journalist, who were being held in Guantanamo Bay. It must make it tough for our government to complain about the treatment of American citizens being mistreated in Sudanese prisons when we are treating Sudanese citizens the same way.

I try to be objective when it comes to President Bush. I don't ever listen to his speeches because his his voice sounds so condescending to me. Instead I read the texts of them because I would rather focus on his actual words instead of the way he says them. When he does something that's good, like his work on a truce in the North-South conflict in Sudan, I applaud even as I wish he did more.

So, when I say that I believe Bush ought to be tried for war crimes, I really am trying to be objective. I've read plenty of folks who clearly are on an anti-Bush crusade, but I don't think I'm one of them. When Bush has admitted to approving the torture techniques that we used in Guantanamo, migrated to Abu Ghraib, and are still being employed by the CIA today, he leaves himself without a defense other than:

"I told the country we did that," Bush said. "And I also told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it."

"We had a legal opinion that enabled us to do it." So much for being the decider, huh? John Yoo gave him a legal opinion that the President could do whatever he wanted, the Constitution be damned, so he did. And he ought to be held responsible for that.