Bush's Iraq and Bhutto -- An American Foreign Policy Disaster: The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the would be and probable Pakistani president, is disastrous for the US. The voice of an avowed US supporter and democracy proponent in a sea of tyrannies, is silenced. She wasn't perfect but she was all we had. Her death, I believe, is yet another nail in the botched Bush foreign policy coffin with the deadly possibility of nuclear arms in the hands of a near anarchistic state ready for the terrorist plucking.
Much of the Middle East chaos now is related to President G.W. Bush and his utterly disastrous Iraq fiasco. Iraq has emboldened violent extremism, especially Al Qaeda, in an area in which they did not exist before. I imagine they think they are now marching to Pretoria. The ill conceived, ill planned and ill perpetrated Iraq venture has created nothing but violence -- despite the so called surge success -- in a bad neighborhood milieu that has been a violent tinderbox ready to explode. Iraq has destabilized that region into fragmented warring pieces which will take years, decades and maybe even centuries to sort out. If we get that far.
Pakistan, harboring and blindly acquiescing to a constellation of potential terrorists, has always been the most important nation state to consider. Iraq, though, took the real target, Pakistan/Afghanistan, and put US blood, treasure and resources into the state of Iraq which had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11 or anything to do with supporting global terrorism as we so sadly found out. Our resources, blood and treasure were spent in the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
Hezbollah still exists in Lebanon and works its heinous magic, Gaza democratically elected Hamas and haunts Israel, Iran is the big man on the block and Syria has influence it could only formerly dream of. Even though these Islamic fundamentalist states and groups are of different stripes, in the long run, Al Qaeda's message resonates and violence rules the day. So they push on.
Bhutto, a moderate, potential and much needed US ally in a central part of the Middle East is now dead and Bin Laden still lives. Those facts alone should hold the G.W. Bush team accountable for the biggest foreign policy disaster in US history. Oh yes, the Pakistani nukes live on as well. I hope the world does too.
