Musharraf mania

When I look at pictures of Pakistan’s so-called president, Pervez Musharraf, standing next to a smiling President Bush, I’m reminded of a similar photograph.\nThe 1983 picture of Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld seems to be long-forgotten.\nSaddam was a key ally to the U.S. directly after the Iranian revolution. The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years and killed an estimated 1 million people. During this time, the U.S. government, sometimes directly and sometimes via other nations, provided Saddam with both strategic suggestions and supplies. The Reagan administration secretly provided Iraq with military assistance, including technology and supplies used to create biological and chemical weapons, including anthrax and the bubonic plague.\nA 1992 article in the New Yorker also states that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush advised Saddam to bomb civilian targets in Tehran and other Iranian cities. He apparently conveyed this message through Arab intermediaries.\nAs far as the chemical and biological weapons used against the Kurds and other groups, the U.S. essentially told Saddam to play nice. In fact, in a memo addressing the chemical weapons question, assistant secretary of state Richard W. Murphy, said “The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is ... important to our long-term political and economic objectives. We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis.” \nIt’s ironic that prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Saddam, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait ... the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”\nIt seems somewhat odd, then, that the current President Bush would say, before his own invasion of Iraq, “By defeating this threat, we will show other dictators that the path of aggression will lead to their own ruin.”\nThis brings me back to America’s cozy relationship with Pakistan’s self-styled President Musharraf. \nAmerica “needs” him to help curb Taliban (which were initially U.S. backed as well) and al-Qaida terrorist activities that operate across the Pakistani-Afghan border. He’s a dictator who received more than $10 billion from the U.S. He’s using U.S. gunship helicopters and F16 jets to bomb the civilians of Balochistan into giving up their nonviolent movement for self-determination. He has arbitrarily fired his chief justice for being outspoken against the government. He has turned a blind eye to rape and violence against women.\nThe most interesting thing?\nAmerica offers up to $5,000 for every captured “terrorist.” Pakistani security forces operating under Musharraf are known to take innocent people and have them shipped off to Guantanamo, where they face torture and other abuses, to reap the cash rewards.\nThis happens to children as young as 10 years old. Our country pays $5,000 for each of these people, including these innocent child victims.\nWhy haven’t we learned our lesson from Saddam? The government needs to stop licking dictators’ boots. It only results in a foreign policy mess or war that some other administration has to fix a decade or two later.