I thought there could be no greater fun than watching Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes of Fox News on the verge of hysteria at the rising terror from Arkansas, bemoaning a Hucklebee running amok in the party they hijacked, a veritable Frankenstein who cannot be relied on to take the orders necessary to execute Neo-con world domination schemes, but I was wrong.
Watching the entire CNN/MSNBC/FOX corp of blathering corporate pundits gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair over the death of the only hope for Pakistan/USA, the death of a world class kleptocrat in a hermes scarf, is a true measure of the level of desperation of the neo-liberal global power elites.
The corporate punditacracy bemoaning the "death of democracy" are full of shit. The disruption of a rigged election stage-managed from Washington has nothing to do with democracy. The attempt to turn Bhutto into a martyr for democracy is preposterous.
She was parachuted in by the Neo-cons to a country where just about every power group hated her. The question is not who killed her, but who got the first opportunity to succeed.
In a rare moment of truth, the WaPo quotes Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and National Security Council staff member saying of Negroponte who closed the deal, “He basically delivered a message to Musharraf that we would stand by him, but he needed a democratic facade on the government".
That's what democracy is, a facade. A "face" for home grown elites and a "face" granted to foreign elites abroad. Bhutto agreed to be a Washington-controlled prime minister as the figurehead for a military-dominated regime aligned with the Bush administration in a country where 70 percent of the population is hostile to US policy in the region. A ratio that Bush and his Democratic controlled congress is accustomed to dealing with. The 70%, both in the US and Pakistan, are given the shaft but its called a "facade".
I think its reasonable to conclude that the 70% in Pakistan are not interested in the "facade".
The second big spin: "Americans were conniving to keep Musharraf in power"
The Neo-cons were always skeptical of Musharraf, whose balancing of various factions, including the Islamists, led the Neo-cons to think he was weak in fighting the ‘war on terror’, in other words, weak in assisting the Neo-cons in killing Muslims. The failure of the US and its allies in Afghanistan could be neatly laid at the feet of Musharraf.
Bhutto, who would do anything for money, was the perfect Neo-con replacement, and the deal was already in place that she would allow American troops to enter the Pakistan border regions to fight those friendly to the Taliban (in stark contrast to her support for the Taliban when she was in power, and something which would have split the country apart, not a bad side-effect from the Neocon point of view).
The best thing about it is that the American plans have yet again been defeated by local resistance with the added bonus: 1) Pakistan won’t have to put up with the future plunder of Bhutto; 2) no break-up of the country caused by the presence of American troops
Pakistan on the edge of turmoil
Princess Ferragamo at the Barricades: The Push for “Regime Change” in Pakistan
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