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Washington (AFP) Nov 9, 2010 Former US president George W. Bush said in memoirs out Tuesday that he wished he'd caught one of the shoes an Iraqi television journalist hurled at him during his final official visit to Baghdad. "I wish I had caught the damn thing," Bush said of the second dark dress shoe thrown at him by Muntazer al-Zaidi at a December 14, 2008 press conference in with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "The guy had a pretty live arm." "Having a shoe thrown at me by a journalist ranked as one of my more unusual experiences," the former president wrote in "Decision Points," his account of this eight years in office. Then again, Bush stressed, he would have scoffed if someone had told him in 2001 that he would one day dine with "the prime minister of a free Iraq." "Nothing -- not even flying footwear at a press conference -- would have seemed more unlikely than that," said the former president, who also underlined that he had joked about the size of the shoe to trivialize the incident. Zaidi told his trial court in February 2009 that he had been unable to control his emotions when Bush began speaking. "I had the feeling that the blood of innocent people was dropping on my feet during the time that he was smiling and coming to say bye-bye to Iraq with a dinner," he said. "So I took the first shoe and threw it but it did not hit him. Then spontaneously I took the second shoe but it did not hit him either. I was not trying to kill the commander of the occupation forces of Iraq." Zaidi also insulted Bush, calling out "it is the farewell kiss, you dog," in Arabic before security forces wrestled him to the ground. His actions won him admiration across the Arab world, with offers of plum jobs, marriage, and even a career in politics flooding in. Zaidi was initially sentenced to three years in jail for assaulting a foreign head of state, but had that reduced to one year on appeal and was freed in September 2009 because of good behavior. He charged upon his release that he had been tortured in prison, "beaten with electric cables and iron bars" as well as subjected to the controlled drowning known as "waterboarding."
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