Is Bhutto Assassination a Wake-Up Call for Left?

Jimmy Carter lost his presidency in 1979 (I think that was the year), when he was shocked that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. He had trusted them. Shocked. Americans didn't want a naive president. They turned to Ronald Reagan.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto's assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama's campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don't be an idiot. (Though yes, Hillary Clinton should be rejected because she supported that hateful war and has never said she was wrong...)

I feel a need for revision. I am not saying there is a clash of civilizations, I don't believe that. I don't believe it is world war iv. But for a universalist like myself, there has been no greater nobility in the last few weeks than watching the Pakistani journalists going to jail for their freedom. They are more inspiring to me than our corporate media, most of whom wouldn't sacrifice any portion of their salaries to tell an important truth. These guys were willing to go to jail! Love them.

I am not saying that the U.S. is a righteous force. Axelrod is right, we are hated in the region for good reason. We are occupying an Arab/Muslim country, and have caused incredible suffering. One thing I take away from this is that Robert Pape's realist analysis of suicide bombing must be revised. Pape's argument in Dying to Win (as I recall; my books are packed, sorry) is that suicide bombers are responding to two conditions: occupation with religious difference. The religious difference allows them to demonize the occupier. Critically, in Pape, the suicide bomber is honored by his own culture. Streets are named after him. They are licensed freedomfighters against an occupier. Not religious fiends from a debased culture who hate modern freedom, as Paul Berman and Norman Podhoretz would have it (those advocates for the great democracy in Israel).

Pape's sample was mostly suicide bombers on Sri Lanka and in Israel/Palestine, as I recall. There is now a much larger database. Yes, it includes suicide bombers who have attacked the U.S. forces in Iraq--an occupier with a religious difference--but suicide bombers have also attacked Shi'ites, Sunnis, etc. And now they are attacking democratic forces in Pakistan. Where is the suicide bomber who has attacked the Taliban? Or attacked Al-Qaeda?

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about "the war on terror". We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can't forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

Comments

[Realist]

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

[Jack]

"This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about 'the war on terror'."

That's rather like saying Pravda was more reliable on Soviet affairs than the Daily Worker.

[ANON]

Why can't our disproportionately Jewish elite subject their foreign policy to the same scrutiny that they subject others to?

Meritocracy!? To merit being the elite means more than possessing degrees and earning high standardised test scores.

To merit remaining the elite means that the U.S. should have a sustainable foreign and economic policy.

If not morally, we can not economically sustain our foreign policy. We are broke. Our dollar declines monthly. Our NATO allies wont fight in Afghanistan. Our elites' children would never consider joining up.

Other than Weiss why wont other members of the "meritocracy" subject their own motives, biases to some serious scrutiny. It will be far better for the elite if they engage in some reform than to wait for events to force change upon them.

[charleshope]

Carter wasn't shocked when the Soviets rolled into Afghanistan -- he had lured them in!

Zbigniew Brzezinski said:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention....We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

[MM]

Wow Phil, so you mean, political Islam really IS the bogeyman that the Zionists claim it is?

Tell me, what did the internal politics of Pakistan, a country born out of and into violence, forever at war with itself, product of ancient conquests, ethnic cleansings, colonialism, religious extremism, and more recently used by the United States to create resistance to pro-Soviet Afghanistan (it was the Pakistani ISI who founded the Taliban, with, ironically enough, then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto [where've I heard that name before...] interfacing with Brzezinski, above), have to do with ANYTHING about American politics? Or one immature American political faction or another being "right" about anything?

You think there's actually some maneuvering going on, some transformational political moment? Where is that happening? I gotta get me the cable! All I see Phil are the same ol' two state parties, their silly assorted publications in tow, all of them set on a militaristic, corporatist, imperialist, hegemonic trajectory for our country that increasingly costs all of us our sons and daughters and our freedoms and livelihoods, and increasingly pays dividends only to those possessing stock options or employment at (insert military contractor/megacorporation here), or named Richard Perle.

Bickering over the best way to achieve American military dominance over the rest of the world, they constrain American political discourse to infantile and fear-based narratives. One of them justifies it all with warrior Jesus and machismo, the other uses the haunt of another Holocaust and mommy. However you can see both unite, in perfect harmony, and with laser precision, should any little bearded university professor-turned-populist-president DARES (DARES!) to say what 90% of the world thinks, that maybe it's the American war machine (despite its earnest and talented cadre of propagandists who keep the "dark menace" black flame a burnin'), that is a threat to the planet, to civilization, to humanity.

There is more than enough "dark menace" horseshit on CNN and corporate Zionist media, Phil. Really. Are you getting paid now or something? Is this and the recent "two state" post your attempt to go mainstream?

Either we deconstruct this empire, or its debris continues to fall on all of us.

[Malcolm]

Trying to impose democracy at gunpoint on cultures and peoples not suited for it is classic blunder of the left, baggage which Neocons brought with them.

government is the result of culture, not visa versa, as the left and neocons continually attempt.

Get out of the region, get out of the middle east, let them stabilize.

[Oarwell]

Bhutto herself said that our intervention and support for the military dictatorship had distorted the democratic process, and asked us to stop.

We've given the Pakistan government 10 billion in the past 8 years. Couldn't that money have been better spent hunting down bin Laden? Like, how about a 1 billion dollar bounty, for starters?

Paki internal affairs should be left alone. We need to stop intervening overseas: U.S. foreign policy is like helicopter parenting, but with real helicopters, and far worse consequences.

[Anonymous]

On Benazir the Chimp is with Xymph:
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2007/12/another-washington-failure.html

[The Fanonite]

Phil, while I agree with the rest of your analysis, you are quite wrong in equating the democratic forces (the journalists, lawyers et al) with Benazir. Benazir only lent them her support when it was politically convenient, and fell silent when dialogue with the General seemed to offer more promise. She was not killed because of anyone's opposition to democracy. She was killed because she had promised to spearhead Bush's war on terror (check out the excerpt of her interview in today's democracy now, where she speaks about sacrificing 'our liberties' for fighting 'extremists'. Well, it appears the extremists have taken to her mentor's preemption doctrine with more gusto (i.e., if we accept that it was the extremists, and not some other faction, such as Musharraf's present democratic facade, the PML (Q), who stand much to lose from Benazir's arrival).

[The Fanonite]

As regards 'forces of darkness', in Pakistan militants form a negligible fraction of the coalition of religious parties. Prior to the 2002 elections, they rarely received more than 3 percent of the vote. In 2002 elections they rode the wave of anti-war of terror sentiment to garner 70 seats in the parliament. My family, a secularlist traditional PML constituency (primarily because of the sentimental attachment with PML being the party of Jinnah), voted for Imran Khan's Movement for Justice in the Provincial, and the religious coalition MMA in the national assembly, because those were the only two parties opposed to the US invasion of Afghanistan. To present it as some global menace is at best disingenuous. The greivances are known, and the ambitions are local. If the militants are able to operate, it has to do with the simple fact that their rage is shared by the people of the Paksitani North- and South-West at large.

[lester]

phil- I heard a very prominent leftist, tariq ali, on democracynow today. his understnading was that Bhutto had largely been forced back into pakistan against her judgement by washington. that the upcoming election was going to be a joke and she should have boycotted it.

in other words, you are using your intuition to assess a situation when you don't have all the facts. not surprisingly, you've ended up with one that is close to the neo cons.

[Anonymous]

Lester, are you still reading "The Nazarene" by Shalom Asch? What are your impressions about it now?

[otto]

The broader problem - even outside Palestine - is that the US and previously Britain are the imperial forces in Middle East and Asian countries since 1945, so in some sense Bhutto was a collaborator with the imperialist powers just like the Indian landlords under the British. That's why the US was backing her.

[J. Martillo]

Phil and I overlapped with Benazir's younger sister Sunny (Sanam) at Harvard.

One of my friends was good friends with Sunny's boyfriend Joe Incagnoli, and I became acquainted with Sunny.

I do not have the impression of much genuine commitment of the part of the Bhutto family to democratization, but I never had any acquaintance with Mir Murtaza, and his daughter Fatima seems to be exceptional.

I give Sunny credit for hanging out with a townie, who was accepted at Harvard and also was trying to make it on the Boston rock scene.

See http://www.rockinboston.com/jhfotos75-81.htm . (I can't believe that there has been talk of bringing Sunny from London to run the PPP. Benazir's 19 year son Bilawal has been announced as her successor.)

I know it is 30 years later, but I see no reason to believe that Benazir was interested in doing anything but maintaining her father's powerbase.

Fatima Bhutto, who is Mir Murtaza's daughter, is a journalist and poet.

When I asked her to sign the petition on behalf of Nadia Abu el Haj, she did.

She recently published a column in the LA Times.

I have heard rumors of a Bhutto-Neocon family connection via Marc Segal, who was Benazir's second cousin and a Washington lobbyist, but I do not know much about him.

Aunt Benazir's false promises
Bhutto's return bodes poorly for Pakistan -- and for democracy there.
By Fatima Bhutto

November 14, 2007

KARACHI -- We Pakistanis live in uncertain times. Emergency rule has been imposed for the 13th time in our short 60-year history. Thousands of lawyers have been arrested, some charged with sedition and treason; the chief justice has been deposed; and a draconian media law -- shutting down all private news channels -- has been drafted.

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto's political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf's regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in Pakistan as "Mr. 10%," have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion from Pakistan's treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing.

It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too late.

Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father -- returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia's military government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with confidence, in the courts of Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government that ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last government -- making Pakistan one of only three governments in the world to do so.

And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.

I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto.

By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are certain of this.

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is the daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was killed in 1996 in Karachi when his sister, Benazir, was prime minister.

[warren]

Thanks for that fascinating article J Martillo. Joe's website was pretty cool tool. Loved the upside down strat.

[Anonymous]

Joachim, thanks for your posts and links.

[Protest]

Suicide missions are forced on the people.
Phil says some Muslims are choosing this act.

When a few Jewish people do something reckless, Phil never limits is to a few. He is generally blaming all of us. The French, the American, the Hungarian, the Israeli Jews.

We are one.

If some of us are Communist, or Atheists, or Kibutzniks, it does not matter.

All Jews are the oppressors of the Palestinians. And we can not voice defense.

Some Arab Soviet Chinese Pakistani Palestinian Iranisn Afghan anarchists and ideologues have no shame to sacrifice the innocent young ones.
Or the Ho Chi Mins and Mao Tzetungs chained their soldiers to the tanks and sent them on suicide missions.
The act was sold well packaged. Or whitewashed or silenced.
Practically all resistance movements represent a lower class than the oppressors from the West.

The only decent path to freedom is learning civility.

Phil's incitement against the Jewish lobby and the Iraqi intervention is a degrading proposal to the Palestinians and Iraqis. Phil advises them to sacrifice themselves, their children because Phil wants to liberate them.

They would have been free yesterday if they had a civilized leadership and a majority of moderate and justice minded citizens.

Phil thinks that they have to die to win.
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I say they have to learn adopt create live civility to become free.
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Without civility, they will remain oppressed forever. With outside oppressors, too.