Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Another Bhutto post mortem

This one by David Warren:

The queen is dead, long live the king. This is the message from Pakistan's "People's Party," founded forty years ago by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as the machine to advance his own political career. ....

... The creed of the PPP -- "Islam is our faith, democracy is our politics, socialism is our economy, all power to the people" -- consists of three calculated lies followed by a howler. A more honest creed might be, "Government of the Bhutto, by the Bhutto, and for the Bhutto." ...

... Those who thought Ms Bhutto the agent of democracy and progress, because she was young and a woman and told them in fluent English exactly what they wanted to hear...

... She was my exact contemporary, and I met her as a child in Pakistan ....at age eight, arriving in a Mercedes-Benz with daddy's driver...This girl was the most spoiled brat I ever met.[...] when she was studying at Oxford. She was the same, only now the 22-year-old version...

... she, a libertine in previous life, submitted to an arranged marriage, because she needed a husband to campaign for office. Stood by him in power only because there was no other political option when he proved even greedier than she was. ...

... In addition to killing a hated symbol of Westernization, they set the mobs not against themselves, but against Musharraf. ... for all his visible faults, Musharraf has been dealing to the limit of his abilities and opportunities with the actual problems of Pakistan.

[via]

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