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Nov. 6, 2009
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Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Dec. 28, 2007 / 19 Teves 5768

When an assassin succeeds

By Rich Lowry


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The roll call of U.S. allies in the Middle East and its neighborhood has always read like a target list: Maliki, Karzai, Sistani, Musharraf. One bullet or one suicide blast could wipe out all our work and rip apart a strategically important country.


Assassinations have steadily picked off pro-Western politicians in Lebanon, and one of our key tribal allies in Western Iraq, Sheik Satter, was murdered shortly after meeting with President Bush. But since Sept. 11, we have been lucky. There have been no assassinations of true geo-strategic significance, except perhaps that of anti-Syria former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose killing prompted a popular backlash that ended the Syrian occupation of his country.


Until now. Until Benazir Bhutto was killed in a shooting and suicide bombing at the end of a political rally in the city of Rawalpindi. Until her return to Pakistan from exile a few months ago, met immediately with threats to kill her from Islamic extremists, ended in a tragedy that is still shocking even if it seemed inevitable.


It's always been the assassin's conceit that he can move history with a single blow. Sometimes, as most infamously with Gavrilo Princip's shot that precipitated World War I, he succeeds. But it is much harder to do in stable, institutionally mature democracies where established parties can be as important as a single man or woman. Pakistan, alternately ruled by civilian kleptocrats and generals, is not such a country. Bhutto will be hard to replace.


In keeping with the clannishness of Pakistani politics, her Pakistan Peoples Party was entirely dependent on her (authoritarian-style) leadership. Her civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, who also recently returned from exile, is soft on Islamic militants and has even been accused of having taken bribes from Osama bin Laden. That leaves President Pervez Musharraf, increasingly isolated politically, without a decent civilian ally with whom to try to broaden his support as his country totters from this latest blow.


Musharraf had seemed on the verge of escaping from the political fix his state of emergency of November had placed him. He had removed judges implacably opposed to his rule, then stepped down as head of the army, lifted the state of emergency and said parliamentary elections would go ahead on Jan. 8. The killing of Bhutto throws the elections into doubt, and will politically weaken Musharraf further as rumors circulate that his extremist-infiltrated security services may have played a role.


If Bhutto's murder were to create a spiral of violence in nuclear-armed Pakistan that Musharraf couldn't control, it would be the most successful post-Sept. 11 terrorist act since the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Iraq, which stoked a civil war that nearly brought us to our knees there. Chaos is militancy's friend, and it is much easier to bring about than lawfully constituted order.


For the terrorists, murder rather than persuasion is the very stuff of politics. It's no accident that the thunderclap that heralded the horrors of Sept. 11 was the assassination in Afghanistan of the anti-Taliban guerrilla fighter Ahmad Massoud. Where it has no majority support and no democratic inspirational leaders of its own, al-Qaida can always kill and hope to gain in the resulting whirlwind.


As Iraq during the past year shows, chaos needn't prevail. But we have more leverage over Iraq than Pakistan, where we have no troops and not necessarily even a dependable ally in power, and Afghanistan, where we are operating in a cumbersome arrangement with NATO forces that have been struggling to take the fight to the Taliban. As our Iraq policy spiraled downward in 2006, it benefited from the sort of thorough rethinking that we now need to bring to bear to Pakistan and Afghanistan.


Because what we always feared has happened -- an assassin has killed a strategically significant target. Bhutto's martyrdom will understandably obscure her misrule the first two times she was prime minister. But on her return, she was a frank voice against Islamism, and no one can deny her this: She was very brave.

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