Celebrating Enmity

The BBC is reporting- prominently- the views expressed by some members of the Iraqi football team. The intro is interesting:

'Iraq's successful Olympic football team has launched an outspoken attack on US President George W Bush.'

Note the implications: this is something the Iraqis have 'launched', and its target is unequivocally George Bush; it is a team effort.

In fact the Iraqis were responding to an interviewer; they were criticising the use of their situation in the US elections, which some broadened to attack Bush personally, and the Iraq football team was neither part of a Bush ad., nor was the Iraqi Olympic team anything more than a passing reference. The ad. stated the fact that there would be two more teams at the Olympics this year- undeniably so- against the backdrop of Afghani and Iraqi flags. Whether the Iraqi footballers like it or not, the image of the Iraqis playing and winning football matches at the Olympics, as Bush rightly pointed out, is pretty remarkable to us. It's a mark of Bush's warmth and broadmindedness (ok, shrewdness too) to notice how much the Iraqis enjoy their 'soccer'.

There are many misrepresentations in this BBC article, which even misreads its Sports Illustrated source, but fortunately, even before the BBC got to it and mangled it, Iraq the Model had these valuable observations to make.