An excerpt:
The hurling of shoes at Bush on his last visit to Iraq as president made an ironic bookend to one of the first images after the 2003 U.S. invasion, when Iraqi opponents of deposed leader Saddam Hussein toppled one of his statues in Baghdad and hit it with their shoes.
Zeidi attained instant hero status around the Arab world. At one Baghdad elementary school, a geography teacher asked her students if they had seen the footage of the shoe-throwing, then told them, "All Iraqis should be proud of this Iraqi brave man, Muntadhar. History will remember him forever."
In Baghdad's Shiite slum of Sadr City, thousands of supporters of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr burned American flags in protest of Bush and called for the release of Zeidi, a 28-year-old Shiite who works for the private Iraqi TV station Al-Baghdadia.
What made Zeidi's defiance particularly resonant for many was their anger at autocratic Arab leaders whom they have considered slavish followers of Bush's policies in the Middle East.
Abdel-Sattar Qassem, a Palestinian political-science professor at the West Bank's An Najah University, wrote in an online commentary: "Bush wanted to end his bloody term hearing compliments and welcoming words from his collaborators in the Arab and Islamic world. But a shoe from a real Arab man summed up Bush's black history and told the entire world that the Arabs hold their head high."
The Iraq war is the most prominent cause of Arab resentment of Bush. Even many who were outraged at Shiite and Sunni militant groups for the killing of civilians and sectarian strife that tore the country apart ultimately blamed Bush for unleashing the chaos. Some accuse his administration of fueling Shiite-Sunni tensions across the region.
More broadly, nearly every U.S. policy in the region became seen as part of a campaign to divide or subjugate Muslim nations, from Iran and Syria to Sudan and Somalia.
The Bush administration's "war on terror" was seen as a war on Muslims and Arabs in general, an image fueled by civilian deaths in Afghanistan and, in particular, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Bush was seen as heavily favoring Israel over the Palestinians. His administration's campaign to isolate the Palestinian militant group Hamas translated to the Arab public as an attempt to starve Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...lysis1216.html