Beside her, on the window side of the seat, was a teenage boy lost in his iPod and earphones. He adjusted himself and his satchel as she sat down, and made as much space as possible for mother and child. Everyone seemed happy enough.

Seated across the aisle from them was an old man with a walking stick. He was quite a thickset man, with white stubble for hair and large, low-hanging ears. I don't know if it's so, but ears seem to grow again once people cross 70. He must be at least 80.

He sat on the aisle side of the seat; the window side was vacant.

Barely had the young mother settled in nicely with her son, when this old Chinese man grunted something to her. I couldn't make out what he said, but she seemed to understand. She gave him a smile, shook her head slightly and mumbled something.

His was an expressionless face. Perhaps he had a touch of Parkinson's, which makes face muscles unresponsive and the jaw hang loose. So no smile accompanied his offer, just sagging jowls.

He let it rest for 10 seconds, then grunted to her again. This time, she responded with a half smile, another shake of the head and a slight motion of the lips in lieu of words.

Having had his offer declined a second time, he seemed to say something to himself. It wasn't voiced, but I noticed how the eyes looked inwards, the head shook a little, and the big hands atop the walking stick twitched in frustration.

Soon after, the little boy took an interest in the teenager, the shiny headset and the connecting wires. His little hands reached out. The mother pulled them back. The boy protested. The mother frowned in admonition.

Seeing this, the old man reached across the aisle, jabbed the mother on her shoulder, and this time was audible. "Sit here, lah. More space. Two person."

"No, no, it's OK," she said, audibly too, before turning her attention to the fidgety boy again.

"Why not?" once more jabbing her to get her attention. "I give you sit, you don't want. I sit there, you sit here," he repeated in his gruff sandpaper voice

She was noticeably annoyed now -- you would be if you had been jabbed twice.

And still he persisted with his offer, louder, more commanding, with the same stern face. Finally, she decided the best thing to do would be to accept the offer and put an end to it.

But as she roused herself and her son to exchange seats with the old man, the boy resisted. He had become frightened of the old man with the loud voice and fierce look. Like all children, he could read the cues; he could see that his mother disliked the man's aggressiveness.

Perhaps thinking that his mother was going to put him in the vacant seat next to the ogre, the boy kicked and screamed. The teenager beside them got the hardest blow from the boy's leg, the satchel bag fell to the floor, spilling its contents. The headset fell off too, entangling itself around the boy's foot.

The move had to be aborted.

"Sorry, sorry, cannot," the mother told the old man. "Sorry, sorry," she said to the teenager.

The little boy held tightly to his mother, whimpering.

The old man grumbled to himself for the rest of the journey.

* * * * *

You can't fault the old man for his good intentions. But the way it was conveyed made it a no-hoper. And yet, you could also understand how it came to be that the intentions were executed the way they were.

Partly, there was language. The old man had only a limited vocabulary in English, unable to phrase his suggestion in a way that would not be mistaken as a command.

Then there was age, which of course is no fault of his. But it meant perhaps a degree of deafness, making him say things more loudly than others might. To the boy however, this only sounded like ferocity.

The Parkinsonian mask didn't help. A kindly smile would have been very helpful, but it wasn't readily available because the nerves and the muscles weren't able to get their act together. The boy only saw a big man with a rough and heavy face.

Why did he jab? Some people just do this instinctively to get another's attention. If one does not cultivate awareness of one's own actions, one never realizes how it offends others.

And finally, why was he so insistent? Maybe it was just in his character, maybe he was one of those who would not take No for an answer. But maybe too, it was a cultural thing, one where patriarchs expect their commands obeyed. Certainly, he seemed quite disgruntled that his idea to swap seats was turned down repeatedly.

So you see, good intentions mean nothing unless there is good execution. We need to have the language and tone of voice to convey our suggestions, and we have to be in command of non-verbal cues. We need to be aware of our own psychology as well as our cultural expectations; equally, we must be aware of the other party's. And finally, we have to be able to judge whether we should even make our offer at all, and when it might be wiser to keep to ourselves.

In short, we need awareness and manners.

* * * * *

And then, there's Iraq.

I know it's highly controversial to even suggest the US went in with good intentions. The received wisdom now is that it was little more than an obsession of the Bush administration, spun up with lies when facts couldn't be found. And indeed, from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction to the fiction of Saddam Hussein buying uranium from Niger, and the febrile claims of alliance between Baathist Saddam and Islamist Osama bin Laden, it's been one sickening falsehood exposed after another.

But there was an argument which is not so easily dismissed. Right after the New York World Trade Center was destroyed on 11 September 2001, minds were focussed on why a section of the Arab-Muslim world was so nihilistic, to the point of cheering terrorists on.

The United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002 gained a readership never before equalled. 

The consensus, after a year or two of sober reflection, was that the seeds can be found in the contempt held by new generation of Arabs towards their own autocratic governments. An angry people saw nepotism, corruption, a failure to deliver good jobs and economic development, and ineffectual, self-serving leadership with respect to the Palestinian problem. When a generation thinks its future is bleak, when it feels so humiliated and disenfranchised that it can't even do much about it, frustration can manifest in extreme ways. This has been made worse by the states' surrender of their educational systems to anti-modern clerics.

The pressure in the pressure cooker has been building up for years, but the lid (the autocrats) is kept tightly on by reactionary regimes supported by the US.

The solution is really not in dispute. The solution, albeit a slow, long-term one, must be to remake the governments in these countries to become much more responsive to their own people, to deliver better social services and economic prospects. The Arab people's energies must be harnessed for constructive ends, not destructive ones. They still may not love America, but at least they need to stop hating and killing themselves.

The Bush administration reduced the subtle arguments of the above to the intellectual level of Fox news: the US shall bring democracy to Iraq. Regime change.

Culpable oversimplification.

George W Bush said, "We are not into nation building; we are into justice," albeit with reference to Afghanistan, but you can assume he thought likewise of Iraq. Yet, if you've read the above, you'd have seen that to fight terrorism, the recipe calls for nation-building above all else.

General Eric Shinseki estimated the US would need "several hundred thousand troops" on the ground to pacify and maintain control of the country, even without nation-building on the agenda. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to countenance much more than 100,000.

So the US went in, and did what they're supremely good at: kill and destroy, with the finest war technology, and gave not a thought about (a) manning the border to keep terrorists out, (b) leaving a local administration intact to maintain order and (c) how to win hearts and minds.

I knew there'd be trouble when before the March/April 2003 war, the propaganda machine from Washington put out the fantasy of Iraqis cheering Americans as the latter invaded their country. I saw a blunder in the making when the White House recalled the way the French cheered the US Army after the Nazis were routed in 1945. Who was that fool who saw any parallel between Iraq and France? The French were being liberated from a foreign occupier; of course they cheered. But how the Iraqis were going to feel might be better compared to how the sullen Germans and resentful Japanese felt when the US marched into their homelands.

And more. Nobody anticipated a guerilla resistance, at least nobody in control of Iraqi policy. Nobody knew anything about the age-old rivalries between Shia and Sunni. And worst of all, the US military ran critically short of specialists with Arab-language skills; many of them were booted out of the military on account of sexual orientation!

And need I remind anyone of the Abu Ghraib prison?

Altogether, the US left itself with neither manners or sensitivity, with no awareness of cultural differences, insufficient manpower that anyway can only jab lethally at people, but not smile, and virtually no language capability either.

If Uncle Sam sounds like the old man on the bus annoying the mother (the moderate Iraqis) and feeding the violent reaction of the child (the Sunni mobs, the Shiite Moqtada mobs, the al-Zarqawi terrorist cells)... yes, that was what I thought too while on that bus.

Now the neighbour Jordan (the teenager with the headphones?) has been kicked. A few days ago, 3 suicide bombers sent by Iraq-based al-Zarqawi into Amman killed around 60 persons. It made the headlines around the world.

The sadder thing is that daily, bombs keep going off in Iraq itself. Daily, 20, 40, 60 people are killed. But they've become background noise, and we have grown numb.

© Yawning Bread