World News & Politics editor on 25 Jan 2007 09:26 am
SOTU Gets Baghdad Makeover
Barbara Bush Boulevard, Baghdad, Iraq (FiniteTimes.com) – President Bush’s State of the Union speech wasn’t hard to miss in Baghdad on Wednesday. The capitol city’s one state-run television station, Iraqi Free TV, abandoned its usual fare of Fox News and The Andy Griffith Show episodes to show the address marathon-fashion throughout the day. But it was a much different speech than the one the American people saw.
“It’s like he hug you, then you find it’s only so he can get close enough to stick a knife in you,” said shopkeeper Ahman Hydoolah. “Then he puts a band-aid on knife wound, then pats band-aid in place with hammer blows. It was a very strange speech.”
Intentionally so, according to Corporal Rene Lopez of the 102nd Information Massaging Battalion. It was the responsibility of the Fibbin’ 102nd to take Tuesday’s SOTU address and repackage it in a form the Iraqis could understand and relate to.
“The locals believe anything that that Al Jazeera feeds them, so we packaged the speech accordingly and gave it a grainy, terrorist-cam look,” said Lopez. “Just for good measure we used as anchoring footage some of the Baghdad Bob stuff from before the liberation. Damn but the locals love that peckerhead. And then, of course, we totally, totally fucked with the translation.”
The overall effect was a dichotomy that Shopkeeper Hydoolah would have recognized:
-Good Bush promises health care to the American people. Bad Bush admits its only to keep the poor healthy so that when they enter the military they’ll be ready and able to “bayonet bad Arabs.”
-Good Bush promises a new, sure-to-succeed strategy for Iraq so that we won’t be in their way much longer. Bad Bush warns that we won’t be in their way because, if this strategy doesn’t work, we’re just going to “nucularate you bitches.”
-Good Bush promises the Iraqi people that he seeks to reduce gasoline consumption by 20% within 10 years. Bad Bush admits that this will happen sometime in late year 9, and to reach this point we’ll need to increase consumption first some 600%, and “we aren’t in a goddamn mood to pay an arm and a leg for all that gas, are we clear?”
“The State of the Union, Middle Eastern version seems to be designed to both put the Iraqi people at ease and scare the bejesus out of them all at the same time,” says Information Layering Specialist Michael Donnelly. “On the bright side, it’s just a State of the Union speech. That’s about as divorced from reality as you can get. If I was an Iraqi, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
Shopkeeper Hydoolah isn’t so much worried as just wearily resigned to Iraqi life post-invasion.
“President Bush is the kind of man you’d sit down to have a beer with,” said Hydoolah as he plastered up bullet holes in the walls of his Barbara Bush Boulevard shop. “You’d be afraid of the repercussions if you said no, wouldn’t you?”
____________
Related Stories