no hanging garden, this [a section of the Green Zone perimeter]
I'm tired of the media's [continuing] misleading descriptions of last week's flight by Bush to Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone. If I thought it was just a question of semantics, I'd leave it alone, but words are important, especially when they are instruments of propaganda and they are going unexamined.
He didn't "visit Iraq".
He didn't "visit Baghdad".
He visited a god-damned super-bunker sheltering people who call him sir.
Even at that our heroic conqueror's departure for his five-hour stop-off inside a fortified headquarters ("the Ultimate Gated Community") shared by his victorious army of pacification and a more-or-less client local government had to be kept secret from his own staff. Also, what does it say about this stunt that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister and Bush's host, didn't know the President of the United States was coming until virtually the moment he showed up at the door?
[image from Rich Galen's Mullings]