What's funny is that in all of the hullabaloo following Bhutto's assassination, there is very little talk about the history of cultural , political, and economic imperialism in Pakistan.

Historically, the United States has supported military dictatorships through military support. There are a more than just a handful of cases like this, especially in the 70s and 80s.

We should be careful about joining the "democratizers" and saying that every country needs democracy. Yes, democracy is wonderful, but let's first fix it in the United States by creating true racial and economic equity and then getting rid of the incredibly archaic system we've come to know and love as the electoral college.

Pakistan doesn't need democracy just as much as it didn't need to be partitioned from India by the UK in 1947, or UK involvement. We need to turn the gaze on our own cultural values before subjecting the rest of the world to our judgmental lens.

International involvement by the United States has only one motive: money!

Anne, it seems to me that you have taken a solid observation appropriate to a couple of countries -- that one-size-fits-all pro-western politicians aren't necessarily welcomed at home -- and invalidly applied it elsewhere.

Anwar Sadat and Hamid Karzai are two points you get right.

But Gorbachev is unpopular at home because it's thought that he embarked on his perestroika without anticipating the impact on the country -- without planning for the after-war, if you will.

Some or all of the Saudis are unpopular in some circles for a variety of reasons, but mainly because they insist on keeping power in the family to the exclusion of anyone else.

And, while Bhutto was bitterly opposed by some elements in her country, that's something one could say about any given politician in any country, including our own. It had little or nothing to do with her activities in the west. Her PPP is popular in her traditional constituency, the one cultivated by her father, while Nawaz Sharif is supported by his constituency, the IJI, the military, the clerics and so forth. Both of them were/are despised by their opponents, and both were monumentally corrupt in office. We don't know precisely why she was killed, but it probably was the Islamic militants who have their own ideas of what a Pakistani government should look like; they also have tried to kill Musharraf, and it appears are targeting Sharif as well. In other words, your thesis doesn't work as regards Bhutto either.

Steve LeVine, author
The Oil and the Glory
http://www.oilandglory.com

Steve's points are correct, but I think the corruption card needs to be discounted a bit in the tendency of the US media to impute to Pakistan what it believes to be widely-observed best practices in the US.

As I have noted elsewhere, Bhutto was well-intended and her policy goals merited consideration. The realpolitik on the ground--as are noted by Anne, Steve, myself and others--simply disqualified her from a successful presidency. The US State Department failed to respect analysis that sadly predicted the past several days.

There is a peculiar new self-righteaousness that has taken form in the US. Institutions --and their "mandarins" and the principles that once were understood and guided--are in decline there. The noise that is following is offering far less substance and critical reasoning for the rest of the world to be comfortable with or confident in.

Also, the casualness of US language offends even when not intended to: "What's funny in all of the hullabaloo following Bhutto's assassination, ..." The rest of the thought about "...economic imperialism" left me wanting for reason. US economic and security hegemony is a root cause, which is what I believe the poster intended to convey (I'm not sure I would see the history of Pakistan, which is more deepll rooted in the Raj and the Commonwealth, as the context for the discussion of US interests/abuse and conflicts of interest there).

Gorbachev is hated in Russia because the Russian people, and other peoples within the Soviet Union, SUFFERED extreme hardship and even hunger for what he did...24 million Russians have left the country since Gorbachev!!

Zipped mouths in the US do not mention facts, but they are real nonetheless and like the evil of slavery in the US, sooner or later will explode by thier nature of contradiction.

Meantime, the US under the lunatic zealot paranoid fascists like Richard Pearl and Podnoretz are turning border nations like Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Georgia and any place they can get their unipolar empire building little hands on into places of CONFLICT, to with: the US is USING these poor poeple to hurl at Russia.

I could care less about any one of these nations, what I fear most is a unipolar world, a new Roman Empire; I read the Federalist papers, and I have seen well intentioned people turn into little authoritarians once they are in the pickle of power. I want a balance of power in the world; keeping balance is the way of the universe.

Ergo, I hope Russia and the US and China and India etc. balance one another off and keep one another from doing anything stupid, so I dispise all this lunatic zealotic neocon war mongering CERAPOLA,.

Unipolar world is as UN-Madisonian and UN-American as it gets.

Steve,

You seem to be reacting to a perceived "they hate us for our freedoms" element in Anne's argument. I don't think that was Anne's point. She's not saying that the political leaders mentioned are hated domesticly because they drink scotch and went to american liberal arts schools and advocate democracy (though I wouldn't discount that completely).

Instead, she's arguing that elite Western commentators and policy-makers tend to develop personal relationships with certain foreign leaders, like Bhutto. These relationships are founded on shared experiences (ie attending the same university) or in the profession of shared values.

These personal affinities blind the commentators and policy-makers. Incompatible facts are discounted. Bhutto becomes Nancy Pelosi in a head scarf, instead of a semi-feudal oligarch with an ethnicly based constituency.

Such cartoonish portrayals prevent the development of a reality-based foreign policy and underestimate the enormous cultural differences that separate nations.

Haven't you noticed yet that wherever US were involved, mess and chaos prevailed?

Re: US interference!

Haven't you noticed yet that wherever US were involved, mess and chaos prevailed?

The carrot and the stick policy.

Double standard policy.

Constructive chaos solution.

Desert Storm solution.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq1, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq2 and the list goes on.

PS: US wants butter and butter money.

French say: EUA veulent le beurre et l'argent du beurre.