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Bill Moyers looks at the quandary we find ourselves in Musharraf's Pakistan vis à vis stability in the Middle East that has eerie parallels to our schizophrenic relationship with Saddam Hussein in Iraq:
Musharref and Saddam Hussein, our friend only twenty years ago, were cut from the same cloth...so once again America's support of a dictator has backfired. Musharraff now says elections will be held by February and he'll quit the army...but he'll still be the man in power so we face a quandary: back a dictator against his own people in the name of a failed strategy to fight terrorists...or back the people and risk democracy. The U.S. invaded Iraq saying democracy was just around the corner. but more than four years of war produced chaos, not democracy.
And proof positive that information is the great democratizer, even though Musharraf silenced the news media, pictures of the rebellion (would that our own lawyers and judges feel as strongly here about the flagrant violations of the law) make their way worldwide via the Internet.
You can watch the entire program and more here.
Steve Clemons of The Washington Note and the NY Sun's Eli Lake debate where the U.S. policy on Pakistan went wrong.