I watched the news about Pakistan and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and all of the clips and quotes from the various candidates as they jockeyed for position, trying to be first and most presidential. “Bring these people to justice” seems to be a favorite topic. And I notice that Mrs Bill Clinton is trying to spin it that she was close to Ms Bhutto. But you knew that already, didn’t you? Of course she was. But after watching all these quotes, and the various talking heads trying to make sense of it all, it struck me that not a one of them was really getting it. Then I read a very interesting piece by Andrew McCarthy over at NRO, and I think that he does.
..There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The democratically elected Hamas government wasn’t enough of a clue for you, was it? The democratically elected mess in Iraq isn’t further proof? And the turmoil in Pakistan over the last two months, was what, good old pre-election campaigning? We’re kidding ourselves in every country in the Middle East, which is our part of why this “war on terror” is not only incorrectly named and prosecuted, it will continue to tie the world in knots for decades to come.
..For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.
Pick up and read a good history of the United States, something like A Patriot’s History of the United States by Schweikart and Allen. Re-read the beginning and pay attention to the foundation and underpinnings of our form of government. Then, reconsider the countries that we are dealing with in the East, and the histories, cultures, and religion that they have for a foundation. Tell me again how just giving them a “democratic style goverrnment” is going to effect the changes that might make our country safer? And while you’re at it, how about explaining to me how having a big group hug, talking nice with them, and giving them a huge bunch of cash is going to help. Explain to me why -I- am the naive one.
..We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it. But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.
Wake up Republicans. Wake up Democrats. Wake up America, and soon. Or perhaps it will take a nuclear armed democratically elected jihadi Pakistan to make the point? I pray that isn’t so.
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