I don’t have much more to add about the assassination of Bhutto, but others have written some very good pieces on this and I wanted to sum them up.

The Left in the U.S. has been accusing various Republican administrations for years for dealing with unsavory characters. The Left blames the U.S. for most of the problems in the world because of this practice. We supported Saddam against Iran, so we are responsible for what he did to Iraq. We are responsible for Iran becoming a militant Islamic state because we supported a corrupt Shaw. We are responsible for the Taliban because we supported the Mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviets.

The list goes on and on.

Yes in hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have supported some of these people, but at the time, supporting them was vital for U.S. foreign policy and strategic interests. There are some unsavory people in the world, but sometimes in order to defeat a greater evil, deals must be brokered with those LESS evil. If you can’t see this or can’t understand this, then I feel you have a very immature view of the world we live in.

Every country has to make deals with the devil. We’ve been propping up various autocratic and corrupt regimes in the Middle East for years, both Republican and Democratic Presidents, because we need stability in the oil market. It’s not the best situation in the world, but it works.

Everything in life is held in a delicate balanced tension. In order to keep things stable and running, you have to pay attention to the competing tensions to make sure they stay balanced.

I had coffee with a childhood friend of mine on Christmas Eve. He is very astute politically and thinks differently than I do. I enjoy conversations with him because he makes me think, he challenges my conventional wisdom. He said something that stuck with me and means more after yesterdays assassination. He told me that the goal of every petty thug dictator around the world is to stay in power. They just want respect. He argues that’s why some want nukes, not for destroying Israel as they claim, but for regional respect from the surrounding thugs.

There is a lot of truth in what he says. During the Cold War, the various thug/dictators knew they could stay in power by aligning themselves with either the Soviets or the U.S. It was very simple, if you supported the U.S., you would get foreign aid and weapons and the U.S. would leave you alone to run your country, abuse your people and embezzle millions for your “retirement”. The same thing happened on the Soviet side.

It worked for the two superpowers because we needed proxy states/buffer zones and it worked for the dictators because they got cash, weapons and people turned a blind eye to what they were doing internally.

For this, the Left blames Bush for dealing with Pakistan’s Musharraf after 9/11. Sure he is a military dictator. Sure he doesn’t have the best human rights record, BUT and this is a big BUT, he HAS NUKES and he wants to be an ally of the U.S. Again, all he wants to do is to stay in power. The radical Islam that is rapidly growing in his country has started to scare the crap out of him after 9/11. The U.S. needed an ally in the region, no matter how nominal, and Musharraf wanted to stay in power.

So what do I mean that the Left is blaming Bush for this? Ace has a terrific post about this where he is showing how the Left wants things both ways:

I do enjoy how the childish leftists constantly make two contradictory complaints: 1) We should engage in more “diplomacy” with these often-unsavory regimes, “talk to them, reason with them,” as Doktor Paul screeches like a girl here, and 2) we should not be supporting “military dictators.”

Um, asshole? Isn’t “supporting” a regime part of “diplomacy”? And which regimes precisely should we be talking with, reasoning with, if not the junta that actually, you know, runs the f*cking country? Should we pretend that some group of university protester types is actually running Pakistan and just “talk with, reason with” them while treating the actual ruling claque as undiplomatically as possible, by shunning them?

They have no answers. None at all.

You’ve heard the various Democratic Presidential wannabes talk about what THEY would do if they were elected. Why, they would open up dialog with Syria and Iran. Really? You would negotiate with them? You do realize that Syria and Iran are two of the biggest sponsors of terrorism don’t you? These are very unsavory people. In fact, by using your logic, negotiating with them will cause America to be at fault in the future if things turn ugly. Guys you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I’ll end with another Ace quote:

It’s all they can do. It’s not “idealism,” it’s dementia, and it’s cowardice. The world is what it is, not what Herr Doktor Paul and Russ Feingold schoolgirlishly pine for it to be.

Here’s another great peice by Andy McCarthy.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Pakistan has nukes? Yeah, this stuff is pretty important…