Opening A Can Of Worms
The New York Times reported last night that the Bush administration plans to dispatch a high-level envoy to Pakistan to tell the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf that the United States is not going to be happy with him if he doesn’t lift his declaration of martial law before holding elections in the country.
Pervez Musharraf is a dictator, plain and simple. Dictators are not normally associated with free and democratic elections, nor do they want to be, and Pervez Musharraf is no different. The man simply has no desire or intention of stepping aside and he knows very well that in a free election he is not going to get anywhere near the votes he thinks he deserves, in fact, he is fairly certain that he will lose. He does not want to lose because he knows that former dictators of Middle Eastern nations do not have a high rate of survival and he is content with things the way they are. For these reasons he has suspended Pakistan’s constitution and the rule of law, he has weakened the judicial system, arrested countless numbers of political opponents, keeps pushing back the date for parliamentary elections, he has shut down independent media outlets and done everything possible bolster his rule over the country of Pakistan.
Musharraf, by hook or crook, is the ruler of Pakistan, and he is clearly a dictator, but so what? There are plenty of dictators in the world and the United States isn’t banging on all of their doors telling them to hold elections. Why are we pestering Musharraf?
Pervez Musharraf has been a good friend to the United States. He allowed our troops into his country so we could bomb the hell out of Afghanistan. He’s screwed up a few times since but he is certainly more of an ally than Osama bin Laden and it isn’t like the U.S. has always been against dictators. Some of our best friends have been dictators. If the U.S. successfully gets Pervez Musharraf to step aside and the country of Pakistan holds their election, there is no guarantee that the winner will be as friendly to the U.S. as Musharraf has been in the past. In fact there is every reason to believe that who ever gets elected will be distinctly anti-American.
Deposing dictators has never worked very well for America. In 1959 when the communists in North Vietnam were banging at South Vietnam’s door and the Kennedy administration felt that free elections and a strong democracy was the best insurance against communist rule. We tried pressuring Ngô Đình Diem, the first elected President of the Republic of South Vietnam to hold free elections but he resisted. Since he was considered an ally against the communist forces we were reluctant to do anything but we couldn’t let it go. He held free elections but they weren’t too successful because the news media was forbidden to mention his opponents by name and most of them were either shot or arrested. When it became apparent that Diem was not going to go down easy the United States quietly had the CIA engineer his fall from power, and in 1963, after six years of friendship, the United States turned its back on Ngô Đình Diem, and quietly stood by while the man was arrested and then assassinated. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam at the time, invited the coup leaders to the U.S. embassy and congratulated them before calling the Whitehouse and informing John Kennedy that “the prospects now are for a shorter war”. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned. Diem was replaced by General Duong Van Minh. Minh was arrested three months later in a bloodless coup that put Lieutenant General Nguyen Khanh in the main seat of power. South Vietnam became more unstable than it had ever been and one military government after another fell in rapid succession. North Vietnam took full advantage of that chaos by increasing its support for the communist guerrillas. Ten years of war and 58,000 American deaths were the direct consequence of the United State’s removal of South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diem. It was later reported, that when the communist ruler of North Vietnam learned of the United States actions against Ngô Đình Diem he stated, “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.”
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was an American puppet. The U.S. helped to force his father out of power. In the early 1950′s the CIA successfully drove Iran’s democratically elected nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq from power, and we put Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back in charge. The Shah knew how he got in power and he did pretty much as the U.S. told him to do. Things bumped along fairly well in Iran until Jimmy Carter came along in 1977. The administration of President Jimmy Carter, unlike previous American presidents, was outspoken about his criticism of the Shah’s government and its human rights record. Carter pressured the Shah to relax freedom of speech and to allow more freedom for political dissidents, and his administration blocked the American exports of tear gas and rubber bullets to Iran when they were needed to put down revolutionary uprisings increasing throughout the country. Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller both condemned Carter’s treatment of the Shah. They pointed out that the Shah was one of our only allies in the region and that the tenuous stability of the Middle East and Iran was dependent on his remaining in power. Islamic fundamentalists were clamoring for power in the country and they were increasingly vocal about the Shah’s attempts to bring Iran into compliance with more modern ideas from the West. When he needed help to put down these revolutionaries, the United States, on Carter’s orders, turned their backs on him. The Shah was inevitably forced to leave Iran after 37 years of rule. Soon thereafter, the revolutionary forces transformed the government into an Islamic republic and the Ayatollah Khomeini became Iran’s new leader. Shortly thereafter he began issuing vicious rhetoric against the United States which he described as the “Great Satan”. The United States has remained the “Great Satan” for every one of the 28 years that have followed the fall of the Shah of Iran.
Pervez Musharraf may not the Pakistani equivalent of the Shah of Iran, but he has been a helpful ally in a region not known for it’s friendly attitudes toward the United States. The former Taliban government of Afghanistan and elements of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda are known to be in Pakistan, and Osama himself may be living somewhere along Pakistan’s mountainous border region with Afghanistan. Without Musharraf in control of the country, nobody can really say who will end up controlling the country or the nuclear weapons they possess. Pervez Musharraf may be the only person between Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and al Qaeda, and removing him from power is a definite gamble. Before we reach up and pull the handle on that slot machine we need to fully understand the consequences of losing. We have faced this same gamble before and we have suffered significant losses. Sometimes it is better to walk away.
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