Pakistan and Bush's Blundering and Deadly Stupidity

The Democratic presidential candidates and the mainstream press are blasting Bush's foreign policy for diverting resources to the deadly (for us) and corrupt client oil state-building project in Iraq, a defect leading to problems and chaos in Pakistan and elsewhere, and a hard political lesson for the Bush administration at home.

From the Times:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday left in ruins the delicate diplomatic effort the Bush administration had pursued in the past year to reconcile Pakistan’s deeply divided political factions. Now it is scrambling to sort through ever more limited options, as American influence on Pakistan’s internal affairs continues to decline.

The lesson that propping up dictatorships, illegally invading countries, and killing millions of human beings, unfortunately, appears to be a mission yet again lost in the corporate American political culture and broadcast media.

And the seeming endless droning on about Bush's delicate diplomatic efforts and our allies in the war on terror are still propagated in the corporate press with no hint of irony or Monty Python absurdity, though the ruin of Bush' blunders are too blatant to be ignored, still portrayed as serious efforts to restore democracy.

The U.S.-supported nuclear dictatorship in Pakistan and Bhutto (comparatively democratic-leaning) are described differently elsewhere.

The Independent: "With (Bhutto) died the fragile hope that Pakistan might drag itself from the grip of the military and the jihadists and find its feet once again as a functioning democracy."

From CounterPunch: For the past three decades, Pakistan has been turned into a "Jihad factory' under the guidance of the US and other Western powers. After 9/11 when Pakistan launched a war on its own people in the name of "War on terror', it was not uncanny to predict that the Jihadis who were nourished previously will turn against their old allies -- the politicians and the military and the innocent people of Pakistan will get caught and entangled as a collateral. ...
During her tenure as twice Prime Minister of her country, she stifled the growth of democracy and undermined the democratic institutions. She not only concentrated in herself the absolute power of the country, but also assumed the title of chairperson for life of her political party -- Pakistan People's Party (PPP). ...

Listening to Bush babble on today, one wishes just one major network anchor would point out the facts that Bush supported a dictator in Pakistan, enabled nuclear proliferation, maintains an illegal war of aggression in Iraq, has both abroad and domestically subverted democratic and human rights, and engaged in militarism around the globe making the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world as that defeatocrat Martin Luther King Jr. used to say before King was assassinated.

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