Iraq, Pakistan, and the Ghost of Saddam Hussein

Trying to find something positive in Iraq is like looking for the proverbial pony.... in a mountain of bloody manure.

But this has to be good news.

Especially since Osama Bin Laden is so worried.

"Our duty is to foil these dangerous schemes, which try to prevent the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq..."

So you know it's got to REALLY hurt.

And what must hurt the most is the fact that Al-Qaeda is being expelled from Iraq not by General Petraeus....although he deserves some credit.

But by their fellow Sunnis .....and the ghost of Saddam Hussein.











Hussein was a brutish dictator but he was a secular one. So in the late seventies when Saudi Arabia started building Wahhabi religious schools or madrassas all over the world, they couldn't build any in Iraq.

Which meant that although the country was extremely sectarian, the common culture remained secular...and nationalist. And the stateless religious fanaticism that Al Qaeda depends upon never took root.

So while at first the Sunnis were glad to have the foreign fighters on their side...it didn't take long before their fanaticism and indiscriminate brutality turned them off.

Which is why after the Americans leave...and the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds work out a power sharing agreement with or without a civil war...Iraq might have a chance of being a modern secular nation one day.

While a country like Pakistan is doomed.

It allowed the Saudis to build thousands of religious schools. Its corrupt military used them to provide the Taliban with recruits and suicide bombers. So now Pakistan is crawling with religious fanatics...including many in the armed forces.

Nobody is safe. And anything could happen.

Some US intelligence analysts fear Benazir Bhutto's assassination could be part of a broader al-Qa'ida and Taliban offensive against Pakistan's secular leadership, focused on spreading militant influence inside the country. Success in this endeavour would pose a direct threat to the US and the broader Western world.

So much for the Great War on Terror.

Let's see if I can get it straight.

To get back at the religious extremists who attacked America, Bush and his neocons invaded the only secular country in the Middle East...and turned it into a magnet for religious fanatics. They never got Bin Laden, but they allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan, turn Waziristan and other barbarous places into safe havens for Jihadi terrorists. And they helped create the conditions for Al Qaeda to destabilize Pakistan .... the only Islamic country with nuclear weapons.

And now it turns out that the most powerful weapon in the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the main reason it hasn't turned into another Pakistan, was the ghost of the man they hanged.

Spare a thought for the old dead tyrant.

Isn't it a crazy world?

Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan's Religious Demons

Now she belongs to history.

And history will decide whether she might have saved Pakistan...or just helped sink it. Whether she was a secular martyr who heralded a new age of democracy...or just another lousy Pakistani politician incompetent and corrupt.

But nobody will be able to deny that Benazir Bhutto was really brave.

She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism.

And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.

A woman of destiny in a failed state going nowhere.

As for who gave the orders to kill her? The way they cleaned up the crime scene with fire hoses I'm sure we'll never know.

But it doesn't really matter. Because we all know where the young man who actually killed her almost certainly came from.

From one of the thousands of madrassahs run by religious extremists who turn little boys into suicide bombers. So Pakistan's corrupt generals and sinister intelligence services can use them as a proxy army in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Boys just like this one.

“Even before you blow yourself up, virgins come to the site of the explosion and wait to take you to Paradise...”

The religious fanatics already hated her for being modern, secular, and of course for being a woman. But by vowing to reform or shutdown the radical madrassahs...and threatening the mullahs AND the generals.... Benazir Bhutto almost surely sealed her fate

Still, the secular generals who make up the high command of the Pakistani army must be sipping their scotches nervously in the garrison town of Rawalpindi tonight.

Ever since they sent off the first wave of jihadis to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan...and all those American billions started pouring in..... they've acquired incredible power and wealth.

But now the suicide bombers are amongst them. The killer children they nurtured with the help of crazy religion are turning on their own. And you can't put those kind of demons back in a box once you've let them out.

Today they came for Bhutto..... tomorrow they could come for them. And their nuclear weapons.

Which means that the Great War on Terror just got more complicated... and a lot more dangerous.

Although in one way it's simpler now. The writing is on the wall. Either Pakistan starts destroying religious fanatics instead of breeding them. Or they'll destroy Pakistan.

Poor brave Benazir. She never really had a chance. And she was a really flawed martyr.

But I'm going to miss her...