Pat Buchanan: Bush Sacrificing Democracy in Pakistan

Famous conservative columnist, Pat Buchanan, puts it eloquently on Pakistan and Bush foreign policy:

What has been the reaction of the great evangelist of Wilsonian democracy in the White House to its suspension in Pakistan?

Military aid to the regime and army will continue.

Welcome to the real world, where state interests always trump ideology. The "world democratic revolution" and the Second Bush Inaugural goal of "ending tyranny in our world" have been put on the shelf. For what is at issue is more critical than whether Musharraf is dictator or democrat.

What is happening in Pakistan exposes, too, the limits of U.S. power and the failure of President Bush - because of the democratist ideology to which he converted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks - to see clearly the real dangers to his country. Our enemy was always Al-Qaida. It was never Iraq. And it is not Iran, at whom the Republican candidates are all braying their bellicosity.

[...]After Sept. 11, those who viewed the horror and asked, "Why do they hate us?" were hooted down as unpatriotic. We were told Muslim militants hate us because we are free, democratic and good, and they are evil.

America can no longer afford to indulge this ideological claptrap. We are hated not because of who we are, but because of what we do. Nowhere is that more true than in Pakistan.

[...] Millions of Muslims now no longer see America as the beacon of liberty, but as an arrogant superpower with a huge footprint in their world, dictating to their regimes. Instead of bringing our troops home after our Cold War and Gulf War victories, we moved permanently into Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Then we attacked a Muslim nation, Iraq, that had neither attacked us nor threatened us, to impose our system upon it.

[...] With the end of the Cold War, America needed a strategist of the caliber of George Kennan. But we got George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the neocons, with their messianic vision of global democracy brought about through an endless series of cakewalk wars.