[caption id="attachment_3154" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="US President George Bush"][/caption] Outgoing US president George Bush turned up in Iraq today, only to have a pair of shoes hurled at him by one of the journalists in his press conference ("size 10s" George quipped nobly). Apparently showing someone the soles of your shoes is one of the biggest insults going in Iraq, so you can see what they think of George. Yesterday British PM Gordon Brown made an equally unannounced visit to Afghanistan, supposedly to cheer up the troops. Given that four of them had been killed in the preceding days this probably wasn't a masterpiece of timing. Heaven knows what the troops made of Brown's appearance. At least the US and British troops in Iraq can see an end to it (in 2011 apparently for the Americans, eight years after the invasion). But the poor sods know that they'll probably be sent to Afghanistan. Which is rapidly becoming worse than Iraq and is likely to go on for a lot longer.