You could almost feel the collective glee that spread around the world when Bush found himself dodging shoes over the weekend.

But it is also a moment of great sadness.

It was the first time in recent memory that the issue of the pain and suffering of the Iraq people has come up in the mainstream media. The only time it has come up in politics since the presidential campaign began two years ago.

What we’ve done to Iraq—yes, I am sorry…but it is “we”—never makes it into mainstream politics, into the mainstream coverage…into the mainstream consciousness of America.

We never heard Obama say that one reason we needed to get out of Iraq is because we killed tens of thousands of innocent people, destroyed their country, forced millions to become refugees and it was wrong…we are sorry and we will get out, pay reparations and prosecute the people who did this.

We never heard Obama or any major candidate even mention the death and suffering of the Iraqi people. Never heard the media ask one question about it. Not one.

This is one way this war is not like Vietnam. The opposition to that war grew as the plight of the Vietnamese, the massive bombing of Hanoi…the picture of a young, naked girl fleeing from the violence we unleashed…caused moral revulsion and exposed the nature of warfare.

1.5 million Vietnamese dead. 2 million total, if you add in the wider war that the Gulf of Tonkin brought to Indochina. I have gone to “The Wall” in DC many times. To meditate on the 55 thousand Americans who died there. To shed tears. And to ponder the names that have no wall.

Now, the President and the media and the American people can duck to avoid the truth as it flies at them. But it is there. The anger and the pain and the reality.

Do we even know how many Iraqis died during Shock and Awe? During the bloody years that followed? And what of “The Surge”? It is now widely hailed as a success. But at what cost?

Early on, the Pentagon and the Provisional Authority issued orders to not count Iraqi causalities. The lesson of Vietnam was learned and implemented. So we really don’t know for certain how many died.

Refugees? We have better numbers there. 1.5 million forced out of Iraqi. About 2.7 million internal refugees.

And this is the real story behind the “success” of the surge. Iraq has been, over time, ethnically cleansed. Neighborhoods and districts and region have been purged of either Sunni or Shia. Whether through our direct attacks, through our proxies or by us taking the lid off of a simmering cauldron, the reason the Surge worked is because whole areas were finally, and methodically, ethnically cleansed.

We were the catalysts for that.

The only real impact of the "Surge" was not the Surge itself, but the decision to pay off Sunni militias in Anbar…to pay off those thousands and thousands of unemployed men who were pissed off that they were broke and American contractors were running amok in their country and importing labor from Southeast Asia…while they had nothing.

Men who lost their army jobs, for instance. Men who didn’t get hired to rebuild the infrastructure we destroyed before we found Saddam in a rat hole. Men who saw their Shia competitors rise suddenly to prominence and take control of the country with our help.

The “Surge” was really an afterthought…a way to paper over the reality of a destroyed country with the veneer of military “victory.”

Perhaps these shoes were the first to drop. People in the Middle East know for a fact what we did in Iraq. The infrastructure we bombed into rubble, only to give crony companies contracts to rebuild it. The millions who lost fathers and sons, wives and children…who lost their homes and their lives.

If we are lucky, they will simply blame Bush and his Shocking Awe Team. The shoes will de directed at them. Perhaps they will forgive us without us ever officially asking for it.

And, by the way, let’s give W some credit for exhibiting some quick moves. He’d be great as one of those human targets in a high school carnival, throw-the-pie-at-the-guy fund-raisers. His ability to avoid being hit could milk a ton of dollars for his "cause."

Wow….that’s kinda like his presidency.