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It's funny, just as I was thinking about a slightly different twist to Chuck0's comment on killing off world leaders, I went back to Bhutto, and found both thoughts ended in the same place, Rome.
I sometimes subscribe in the abstract to Munson's thought, and sometimes don't. After all none of these leaders (aka assholes) seem to have the slightest compunction about killing us for their plans. So fair is fair. How about I suggest your ass dies for the greater good? The problem is that political murders almost always kill liberals in quasi-democratic or open states and hardly ever knock off the seriously nasty bastards in real police states. Well, because the latter are paranoid tyrants who know better than to poke their head out of windows. Take our own George Asshole Bush. You never see his smiley ass poking up out of sunroof. Remember he entered the White House behind a sniper-proof screen. Meanwhile, nobody seems to go after the capitalist class who have routinely insured we all live a long slow death in meaningless jobs in human degradation for their benefit. Why is that progress?
But then again, there are always leaders like Martin Luther King or Malcom X to worry about---great and potentially great popular leaders who are killed too soon. Meanwhile egregious fuckers like Nixon or Reagan seem to last forever and die in their sleep, as will George Bush no doubt someday, not soon enough for me.
Now for the connection to Bhutto. What Pakistan reminds me of is ancient Rome in the second century when political assassination backed up by insider power-broker intrigue became the primary mode of changing civilian and military leaders in the upper echelons. The Roman state could never go back to the republic form and would not give up its reliance on a giant standing army to keep civilian order in the imperial seat, as well as in the far flung periphery where war lords and organized barbarian hordes had to be routinely defeated---hence moving up the ranks was won in fearless battles and literally cut-throat methods.
It wasn't just Rome. Even a limited reading in Islamic history this week (on vacation), mostly Muslim Spain following Averroes and Maimonides (more background on Strauss)---paints a similar picture of the Spanish Caliphate. (BTW there was a nice history on PBS the other night on exactly this topic---Cities of Light.) Or I could go back and dig up some of the books on Alexandria, and find similar developments---the constant threat and repeated outbreak of civil wars, assassinations, new leaders, more and different religions, more murders, invasions, sieges, etc.
And then there are my experiences inside community organizations absolutely reif with intrigues, petty, mostly egotistical power plays, slow burning betrayals, sell-outs, kings and queens for a day, and lesser gods of all sorts---really a circus of fools, more than the idealized grassroots political democracy. I used to shutter at the idea that any of my acquaintances, friends or enemies in these orgs would ever get a hold of any established political power, because real democrats were an extremely rare breed in these places.
And here is the deepest irony of all. The three men and one woman I knew in those years who did get high level state and federal appointments became relatively ineffectual bureaucrats---because their subordinates didn't fear them and therefore wouldn't change their ways---that is the systems were immune to reform from within. What a terrible political lesson that was. A little more Machiavelli and a lot less `let's all get along' might have worked! Or maybe not. Maybe, in hindsight it was experience and reflective knowledge about people, human nature, history, or what have you, that was missing. I'll never know.
Really in the end, political power is a very strange animal, as the idiots who killed Bhutto will find out, as the idiots who arranged for her return will probably never understand, and as the Pakistani lawyers, cursing in prison cells or drinking tea in shops and arguing like crazy are discovering. Managing this animal is more like a magic art of some sort and there isn't any fixed way or any set of rules. While I might subscribe to a materialism of history, it almost never works out---magic, accidents, random events, the arbitrary will of people make it impossible.
The above mystery is exactly why there will be, absolutely can not be any way for the US to have anything but disasters in blood on its hands if it continues to try to manage other states and other people. Just get the fuck out, period. Leave. Leave it all. Go home. Shut it down. Just walk away.
So, tonight I watch the pundit class and its political lights discuss it all in rational terms of US policy, Pakistan society, with lots of ego positioning, sub-Rosa racism, cultural blinds, etc, etc. Fucking idiots.
Maybe I subscribe to a moderate to more than moderate chaos, a kind of unruly-ism, well with occasional murders, accidents... What is a more than moderate chaos? A kind of anarchism of the soul?
CG