Here We Go Again

Remember him?

Some knotty questions about the ongoing crisis between the Islamic world and the West actually have intelligible answers. Case in point: Why do Iranians hate the US so much? It has largely to do with the late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a creature of US policy who ruled Iran despotically for almost 40 years. We put the Shah on his Peacock Throne; we armed him, and for as long as we could we propped him up, until popular revulsion brought him down in 1979, giving birth in the process to the concept of the Islamic Republic. Iranians aren't thankful to us for this.

We're living through the same sad charade all over again in Pakistan, only today, events move an order of magnitude faster. Pervez Musharraf will be gone one way or another, soon -- before the 2008 US election, I suspect, in time to become a very high-profile issue. What Musharraf will leave behind in Pakistan when he slinks into exile (or, perhaps as likely, dies) is certain to be an angry, widely anti-American nation in crisis, tilting toward establishment of another Islamic fundamentalist state (it's too soon to say "Republic").

In other words, Iran all over again, but with two important differences:

• Pakistan has provided a haven and home for al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership for at least seven years. With Musharraf gone, the US military will have to take a serious look at crossing the border from Afghanistan to take al Qaeda's leadership out, consistent with US policy that countries that harbor terrorists are subject to attack, precisely as we did to rout the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity out of Afghanistan. Bush policy in effect requires the US to take this step, and it will be too late to worry about the effect of such an incursion on our "ally" in Islamabad. However...
  

• With Musharraf gone, we will no longer be able to pretend that an incursion into Waziristan has any sort of official support from the Pakistani government. It will be war with Pakistan, and Pakistan is already heavily armed with nuclear weapons, largely with the blessings of the US.
  

Now is when we want to launch air strikes on Iran, over nuclear weapons they might some day manage to whack together? I think we have more immediate things to worry about just to Iran's east. Pakistan, after all, already has the world's worst documented history of proliferating nuclear weapons technology to countries hostile to the US.

I could go on; I got up this morning feeling as if I was onto something original in connecting Musharraf's fate to the Shah's, but of course this has all been said eloquently before. Ivan Eland, Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, said it well enough back in May.

So I'll just add a postscript: The infamous 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Teheran was sparked principally by the US's decision to provide the deposed Shah with a comfortable exile. Note to Sec. Rice: Assuming Musharraf manages to escape from Islamabad with his skin intact, could we possibly avoid making that mistake all over again? Hmm?
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