When Will We Ever Learn?

Aitzaz Ahsan argues, in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, that the Bush Administration is being complicit with Pervez Musharraf's destruction of Pakistan's legal system. Musharraf, like any other tinpot dictator, wants to make sure that the judiciary is a compliant tool of the dictator.

If you seek a reason as to why the militants are gaining traction in many nations, this is why. The various dictators squash all moderate dissenters, to the point that the only voices that can survive in opposition are the militants. This is not just Musharraf, they all tend to do that (and yes, even Bush would if he could).

But dictatorial regimes inevitably fall. And when they do, the people of that nation look at who supported the dictator. Many, many times, they see that it was the hand of that self-styled paragon of democracy, the United States of America, that supported the dictator. And they remember that.

Sending out Karen Hughes on "touchy-feely" public relations trips and promoting advertising, as though the USA was a brand name, isn't going to cut it. Anti-Americanism finds fertile soil where the ground has been prepared by our actions, not by our words or ideals. When the "regime of the colonels" fell in Greece in 1974, there was a bitter harvest of anti-Americanism. The same thing happened in Iran in 1979.

And it may happen in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia. There is no guarantee that the successor governments will be anything more than distrustful of the US, if not hostile.