The Deathly Touch

Any thing the Bushman touches, goes wrong. Man, what a guy and what an administration!

The NYT reported that US Secretary of State Condi Rice tried to fix Musharraf's subsequent dwindling legitimacy by arranging for Benazir to return to Pakistan to run for prime minister, with Musharraf agreeing to resign from the military and become a civilian president. When the supreme court seemed likely to interfere with his remaining president, he arrested the justices, dismissed them, and replaced them with more pliant jurists. This move threatened to scuttle the Rice Plan, since Benazir now faced the prospect of serving a dictator as his grand vizier, rather than being a proper prime minister.

With Benazir's assassination, the Rice Plan is in tatters and Bush administration policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan is tottering.

Update: via Atrios

In terms of policy implications, this is reflective of a massive US foreign policy blunder, in that the Bush administration, in a monumentally stupid move, shoved Bhutto down the throat of Musharraf (and the rest of Pakistan) as a savior, despite her lack of broad popular support and general reputation as corrupt. In making someone who didn't necessarily have the ability to deliver the savior for democracy in Pakistan, we simultaneously set up our own policy to fail and offered Musharraf a return to (or continued) total power in the event that our little power-sharing arrangement didn't work. We also -- though not only us -- painted a big fat target on her back. Really a debacle all the way around.

Of course, "When you look into the General's eyes, and he says to you I'll take care of the Taliban and the extremists", you trust him. At least if you are Bush.

Bush's Brain

Bush thinking out aloud on the Saudi incident in which a rape-victim was sentenced to six months in jail :

"My first thoughts were these: What happens if this happened to my daughter? How would I react? And I would have been ... I would have been very emotional, of course.

"I'd have been angry at those who committed the crime. And I would be angry at a state that didn't support the victim.

Now we know why he didn't get emotional about, say, Abu Ghraib - he doesn't have any sons.

India's Greatest Friend

But do we want such a friend?

Bush Does It Again

Removes some of the sticking points in the nuclear-cooperation act - or at least makes them basically not worth the paper they are presumably written on:

In an effort to allay official Indian concerns about several aspects of the nuclear cooperation legislation passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this month, President George W. Bush declared on Monday that he would not be bound by some of the law's provisions.

In a formal statement issued shortly after signing into law the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006, Mr. Bush introduced three specific caveats based on the executive's constitutional prerogative to conduct foreign policy.

This is a president who rules more like a king, and uses signing statements - the above is an instance of them - to do it. Or abuses them, though I'm not complaining in this case.

The Prime Minister seemed uncannily confident about India's conditions being met - maybe his people had done their homework on Bush. I'm not sure if all the criticisms have been allayed by this signing statement - it does not look like it. But things probably bode better for the 123 agreement which is in the works.