It's cowardly and ungentlemanly for a man to hit a woman. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the first woman leader of an Islamic country, speaks volumes about the cultural handicaps faced by would-be Westernizers of the Middle and Near East. Honor killings, female genital mutilation, the veil, and dowry killings are among the barbarities that plague nations in the region. To go from all that to killing a woman armed merely with words is not so far a leap. To go from all that to religious tolerance, free speech, and equality under law is a very far leap.
See now, I always thought that if they could all just get along and sit down to talk things out, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
Primitives.
Still Bush's fault.
I logged back on to the computer after several days of going completely without news of any kind, and the headline telling of her assassination sent chills down my spine, literally.
As to the points you make - very well put; and yet all we hear from the US Government is the importance of bringing democracy to Pakistan (and all these other middle eastern countries who do not believe in liberty or individual rights at all.) Why don't people get that democracy can be just as bad as a dictatorship? Why all the insistence on democracy as something good?
To have democracy or to not have democracy?
Doesn't matter without the culture and the rule of law to support it.
How about we try a novel approach of a more neutral position as regards the internal development and affairs of these backwards nations. Like Reagan said, we just don't get the irrationality of politics in such tribal ME countries, nor do we have to to get along.
Beef up our intelligence and actual national (w/in this nation) security and then we can likely handle any possible threat that may arise from the chaos which is nuke-armed Pakistan. All of the nations over there have a much more pressing concern than we do as regards the fate of Pakistan's regime and nukes, I am sure the Arab League can handle the threat.
We need more realism in our foreign policy.
What's scariest about this is that you have an extremely unstable part of the World, full of primitives, that have access to nuclear weapons.
