Posts with the tag 'Pakistan'
When your quest to sound relevant and important leads to insulting our closest neighbor and ally, in my book, it’s cause for real concern.
Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics reports:
It’s never good when a story that you’ve slapped down as false gets up and slaps you back - as the NAFTA story has just done to the Obama campaign. The AP reports of a memo surfacing that appears to support the original version of the story that an Obama advisor told Canadian government officials that Obama’s railing against NAFTA was more or less just campaign rhetoric.
The AP story goes on to say
According to the memo obtained by The Associated Press, Obama’s senior economic adviser told Canadian officials in Chicago that the debate over free trade in the Democratic presidential primary campaign was “political positioning” and that Obama was not really protectionist.
In the words of David Byrne, ‘this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.’ Obama (as is the case with many liberals) needs to realize that, given his position as a potential Commander-In-Chief of the United States, his empty-headed, off-the-cuff rhetoric can carry real world consequences. Obama, like most liberals, has a nasty habit of thinking that he lives in a vacuum, and that his rhetoric is shielded from consequence by the mere presence of good intentions (remember his rhetorical foray into Pakistan?). Obama would do well to remember that unlike a high school debate class in which all rhetoric is forgotten at the end of the day, his words, at least until November 4th, will have real, possibly earth-shattering implications.
It is my hope that his future choice of rhetoric will reflect a more thorough understanding of its implications.
Tags: Canada, liberal lies, NAFTA, Pakistan
March 3rd, 2008
From Powerline:
Sunday morning, ABC’s This Week ran an interview George Stephanopoulos had done with Sen. Clinton on Friday.
The interview produced this gem:
Referring to a possible delay in the elections, Sen. Clinton said: “I think it will be very difficult to have a real election. You know, Nawaz Sharif [leader of the PML-N, an opposition party] has said he’s not going to compete. The PPP is in disarray with Benazir’s assassination. He [President Pervez Musharraf] could be the only person on the ballot. I don’t think that’s a real election.”
And then it hit me:
Sen. Clinton really didn’t know that the upcoming elections were for individual seats in Pakistan’s parliament. She actually believed that Bhutto, Nawaz and Musharraf would be facing off as individual candidates for leadership of the country in the upcoming elections.
Sen. Clinton didn’t know that Nawaz Sharif isn’t allowed to run for office in Pakistan because of a felony conviction. She didn’t know that President Musharraf won’t be on the ballot because he’s already been elected.
Sen. Clinton, a candidate for the leadership of the free world, apparently doesn’t know the first thing about the country referred to by some as “the most dangerous place on earth.”
To be sure, probably not one American in a hundred knows the ins and outs of Pakistani politics. But Hillary Clinton isn’t one in a hundred - she is aspiring to be one in three hundred million. She has a vast staff able to keep her informed of all the crucial issues of the day, but as Powerline notes, that quoted bit was the second time she referred to a mythical Presidential election in Pakistan. Once is an excusable error - twice is evidence that Hillary just doesn’t care what is happening in Pakistan.
Why does this matter? Because in a little more than a year, Hillary might be getting sworn in as President of the United States and thus it is her basic duty to keep well-informed of major global events. She doesn’t need to know who is Prime Minister of Croatia, but she does need to know the details of the crucial issues. Pakistan is a crucial issue - everyone who is running for President should be up to speed on what is going there.
The indication here is that Hillary is just entirely focused on the act of becoming President - and indicators indicate that this is all she’s done since some time in 1999. People who get that obsessed about a goal are in an unhealthy state of mind. The very state of mind which should make a person entirely disqualified for a position of power.
Tags: Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan
January 2nd, 2008
Victor Davis Hanson gives us the flavor of Bush’s critics, GOP and Democrat:
Mike Huckabee, in his Foreign Affairs article once suggested that we might have to invade nuclear Islamist Pakistan. On the death of Ms. Bhutto, his Carteresque gut reaction is now to apologize - but for what?
Barack Obama likewise once thought an armed incursion into Pakistan was an option worth considering; and today Obama tries in desperation to tie the assassination somehow to Iraq, and by extension to Hillary for voting for the war in Iraq.
Bill Richardson wants to force Musharraf out of office from a sovereign autonomous — and nuclear — nation.
Ron Paul, well, is Ron Paul, and ties the disaster to U.S. intervention and thus by extension it’s our fault.
And these are the voices of reason that so often fault a supposedly arrogant Bush on foreign policy?
Hanson goes on to note that the people who will benefit from a renewed realism will be McCain and Giuliani on the GOP side, Clinton on the Democratic side. I’d add Romney to that, too - while he hasn’t got a lot of national security experience, he’s at least stayed away from any foolish statements on foreign policy. Richardson, especially, has gone off the deep end - he’s running for VP, but he’s just made himself someone who brings nothing to the table - not lefty enough to balance a Hillary candidacy, not centrist enough to balance an Obama or Edwards ticket. These Democrats who have suggested a US intervention in Pakistan are like the French of 1940 - willing to fight anywhere, against anyone, as long as it didn’t involve fighting the main enemy in the central campaign of the war.
McCain, Romney and Giuliani would all serve us well in foreign and defense policy - but as I’ve noted before, we’re going to miss President Bush’s decisive leadership very quickly after he leaves office. I know our lefty friends will go bonkers over that last assertion and in response to their bonkerism, I say: whatever. For those of us who aren’t suffering from BDS, President Bush has been the best foreign and defense policy President we’ve had since Reagan, and in some ways he’s eclipsed Ronald Reagan.
Tags: Benazir Bhutto, Iraq Campaign, Pakistan
December 27th, 2007
Mark Steyn, with his usual good humor, injects a note of reality into the debate about Pakistan:
Pakistan is not Persia. For one thing, it’s a country only 60 years old whose slapdash creation was one of the worst disasters of British imperial policy. Yet even those who thought so at the time would be astonished to find that, a mere couple of generations on, a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world’s first global insurgency. If General Musharraf is shooting without a script, what would you do stuck in a toxic soap opera where the incoherent plot twists pile up with every passing decade? It may well be that a Bhutto restoration will be the happy ending foreign-policy “realists” predict. But it’s more likely that a return to traditional levels of democratic corruption will cramp the economic interests of much of the military and lead key factions to make common cause with the Islamists — as Pakistan’s intelligence service did with the Taliban. I don’t know for sure, and nor does anyone else. But sometimes it helps to bet on form. And, given the last 60 years, the real question is how bad things will be after Musharraf. This thing can’t be scripted, in Washington or anywhere else.
It is good to keep that in mind - Pakistan came into being because the Moslems of India refused to be placed under the rule of long-despised Hindus who were taking over from an exhausted British Raj. It is where most of India’s Moslems lived, but not all of them - and millions of them were forced (by one means or another) to remove themselves from Hindu-ruled India and settle in Pakistan, a nation which never existed even in theory prior to 1947.
Pakistan is a swamp of conflicting ethnicities and interests to which has been added the poison of Islamo-fascism. Musharraf may be every bad thing everyone says, but he is also still the best the world has got in Pakistan. Steyn points out earlier that a very large number of Pakistanis are in direct opposition with Musharraf’s anti-terrorism efforts - in fact, a vote in Pakistan would probably result in a decidedly Islamist government directly at odds with our strategy in the War on Terrorism. We want democracy to spread over the Moslem world, but we want it to spread with a message of life and hope, not war and despair. Right now, in Pakistan, the Islamists propaganda coupled with extreme ruthlessness in Islamist controlled areas has resulted in a still-vigorous Islamo-fascism while it has faded in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will take some time to crack this very tough nut - and the worst thing we can do is go blundering into Pakistani politics.
Patience is what is required - we must, of course, prod Musharraf into securing liberty for his people and an eventually democratic transition of power. But we’re also not in a rush here - Pakistan, in a very real sense, has never known a moment of truly free government in all of the 6,000 odd years civilization has existed in that area. Another 5 or 10 years before they get it won’t be the worst thing that ever happened in human history. In the end, it is either show some patience or resign ourselves to another Iraq-style campaign of four or five years of forcibly midwifing democracy. We can do it that way, but I much prefer to let the Pakistanis do it entirely on their own - and given that Musharraf, for all his flaws, is no madman like Saddam and does seem to want a good future for his country, I’m willing to give Musharraf his chance.
Tags: March of Democracy, Musharraf, Pakistan
November 12th, 2007
