Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I'm asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while - which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries.Benazir Bhutto’s the latest casualty in a worldwide war that’s been going on for decades.
She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be - though in practice, as Pakistan's Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world's most corrupt political classes.
Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly.
Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation.
"Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything," I wrote last month. "It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate."
The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They'd arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a "united" "democratic" "movement" and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them.
That's what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get 'em round a table.
But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan.
Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death.
Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her.
On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee.
As I said, she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions.
Rest in peace, Benazir.
As for "the whole of the western world" being behind her, much of the “western world” isn’t even looking out for its own best interests.
One reason the Islamists have made progress in the terror war has been the unwillingness of so many in the West to even admit it’s going on. They talk snidely of “George Bush’s war on terror.”
Another reason is that so many refuse to believe the Islamists are people every bit as evil and determined as were the Nazis.
As with the Nazis, you can’t safely negotiate with such people. You can only destroy them or be destroyed.
But many Westerners shrink from admitting that.
Instead our human rights organizations spend their outrage on Guantanamo, our news organizations loudly proclaim they’d never publish those Danish cartoons, and today John Edwards assured the people of Iowa he’d just talked to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and advised him on what to do next.
Benazir Bhutto: RIP
2 comments:
As one who tried for years to epathize with and "understand" the Muslim world, I am gradually experiencing an epiphany. Each day, I become more contemptuous of Islam, indeed, of that entire region of the world. That Muslims practice a "religion of peace" is flatly disproved by the ritual murders, videotaped throat-slittings, mass murders by suicide bombers, and just plain inhuman behavior. May they all go straight to their "hell!" If all of southwest Asia were turned to cinders, it wouldn't be much of a loss to the rest of the world.
Call me "Sick of Murder in God's Name"
Political Correctness will be the destruction of our Republic.
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