Presidents

U.S.-backed Pakistani Pervez Musharraf rules the country as a "President," according to American corporate news broadcasts and the Bush administration.

Though Musharraf seized power in 1999 through a military coup, has suspended the Pakistan Constitution twice, and cancelled elections, Bush has held steadfast with Musharraf.

Compare this relationship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who Bush and Condi Rice regularly chide for not being "democratic," and destabilizing.

After all, Chavez is giving Venezuelan oil money to the people of Venezuela, and holding elections and referendums, so Chavez must be a threat to Bush and Rice's idea of a democracy.

On democracy and freedom, Bush and Rice have less credibility in the world than they do in the United States, and that's very low and appalling to people who are concerned with such matters. Bush is simply another in the line of numerous American presidents who sing the praises of democracy while subverting it abroad, and in Bush's case at home.

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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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The Neocons Meet Their Match in Musharraf the Con Man and Dictator

From Horton at Harper's:

... American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered up year-end remarks in which she congratulates herself on her foreign policy successes in 2007. Rice, of course, hopes that no one examines that claim too closely. In fact the year has marked a series of stunning reversals for her foreign policy stewardship. Nowhere are those set-backs more dramatic than in Pakistan—one country where Rice urged, and the White House rather belatedly adopted, a shift designed finally to try to nudge the country’s leadership out of the grave they’ve been digging themselves. It was, however, a classic case of too little, too late. ...

In sum, the Bush Administration’s Neoconservative team met their match for confidence artistry in a military man named Pervez Musharraf. He presented himself as the only game in town, the man they had to come to love—or else. And in this way, Musharraf was able to get his way on just about everything—picking their pockets as he went along.

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Bush's Stunning Hypocrisy

Anyone outside of Fox News knows Bush could not care less for human rights and democratic processes.

Bush is, in fact, antithetical to these rights, and depended on voter suppression at home and a corrupt Supreme Court to seize political power.

Now comes Gen. Pervez Musharraf, never a president and always a dictator (though one restrained by domestic forces) and his blatant attack on human rights activists and the rule-of-law professionals (the Bushies cannot stand these types at home).

For some good fun, read Frank Rich hammering away:

The Coup at Home
By FRANK RICH

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t saythat waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency.

You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum
until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan.

When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.” Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terroristhaven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

More at The Coup at Home.
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