Benazir Bhutto was a dead-woman walking the day she set foot back on Pakistani soil. It was only a matter of time, and that time came this week.
While I'd like to lay at least some blame for Bhutto's assassination on Bush administration meddling in Middle East politics, I can't. Instead the blame for this latest regional bloodletting lands squarely and exclusively in the lap of what I have come to think of as "Muslimocracy" -- the primacy of Islamic law, or Sharia, which is still deeply rooted in the souls and minds of the people of that ever-troubled region.
Muslimocracies view the non-Muslim world as their an enemy, and anyone within a Muslim nation who does not share that view, is viewed as a friend of their enemy. That is what got Bhutto killed today.
I rarely agree with George W. Bush on anything, but he was right once. It was when he was running for President the first time. Back then he warned against wasting US lives and resources on "nation building" efforts abroad.
Then he got elected and embarked on the most audacious, aggressive and illogical nation building effort in modern history. As a result the world got to see the wisdom of Bush's original position and the folly of his current one.
Today, when someone criticizes Bush for trying to bring democracy to the backward Muslim nations in the Middle East, he scolds them for displaying "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
Well, sometimes low expectations are not the product of bigotry, but data. As a self-described country boy Bush surely must have heard some crusty old farmer remark, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink."
Which brings me back to Pakistan -- et al. You can lead them towards democracy but you can't make them democratic. And, in the rare instances where they apparently relent, they use democracy to enshrine Sharia law, which is to democracy a lynching is to justice. (Remember how the Palestinians embrace of democratic elections resulted in the elevation of Hamas. And, if free and open elections were held today in Egypt the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood would be swept in to power.)
As I've noted in more than one previous post, Pakistan is not our ally in the war on terror. Neither is Iraq. Nor is Egypt. And most certainly not Saudi Arabia. Those countries are our allies the same way a cobra is an ally of its snake charmer.
Unreconstructed Islam has been and remains Muslim country's kryptonite against super-power strength. The Soviets learned that the hard way when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. The US is now locked in the same futile exercise of imperial hubris in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and possibly soon in Iran and Pakistan. It was a lesson learned a century earlier by the British, as immortalized by Kipling:
Now, it is not good for the Christian's health
to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles
and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
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