[lbo-talk] Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch

[Carl Remick]

On 11/5/07, Sujeet Bhatt <sujeet.bhatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/world/asia/04assess.html?em&ex=1194411600&en=4c1aceb6a572e1b8&ei=5087%0A
>
> News Analysis
> Musharraf Leaves White House in Lurch
>
> By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and HELENE COOPER
> Published: November 4, 2007
>
> WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 — For more than five months the United States has
> been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that
> would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without
> making a mockery of President Bush's promotion of democracy in the
> Muslim world.
>
> On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now
> the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options
> and a lack of clarity about the way forward.
>
> General Musharraf's move to seize emergency powers and abandon the
> Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their
> nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil
> instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly
> alienated public. ...

Yes, I certainly chortled over that piece of NYT analysis -- or at
least I chortled as much as reasonable considering the extreme global
peril the Pakistani crisis presents.  Musharraf's action puts a bomb
right down the smokestack of Bush's foreign policy -- GWB's whole
illusionist stunt of bringing democracy to the Islamic world has been
blown to smithereens.  Not a shred of the US's pretense to be an
advocate of civil liberty in the Islamic world remains intact.

Carl