The life and death of Benazir Bhutto

There are several interesting articles and special features in Friday’s New York Times on Benazir Bhutto. Here is a profile of her life, character, and career, in particular how she was shaped by her wealthy background and sense of entitlement, and by her father who was executed in 1979, an event that steeled her and drove her political career.

Here is an op-ed she wrote for the Times on November 7 denouncing President Musharraf’s seizure of power. In it she says that promoting democracy “is the only way to truly contain extremism and terrorism,” and challenges President Bush to back up with actions the utopian words of his 2005 inaugural address.

Here is a photo essay and audio commentary by photographer John Moore who photographed Bhutto during her final campaign rally and took the last photo of her standing through the sun roof of her car before she was shot. Moore has key observations about the bad decisions on Bhutto’s part that made her more vulnerable on that day to assassination. For one thing, her previous campaign rallies had been small and were not announced in advance. This rally was very large and its time and location had been announced a week in advance. Also, she was unusually passionate in her speech, shouting into her microphone which she rarely did, and the crowd was unusually stirred up. This apparently contributed to her decision to stand up through the sun roof of her car after the speech to respond to the crowd. (Sounds like Bobby Kennedy’s emotion-driven, reckless interaction with crowds in the 1968 California primary.)

Also on the Times’ main page (no permalink) is an eight minute audio interview with reporter John Burns who covered Bhutto’s earlier terms in office. He spoke with Bhutto in October at a conference in Aspen, Colorado just before she returned to Pakistan. He said she was pale with anxiety about the prospect and was aware of the dangers, and he felt that it would be the last time he would see her alive. He says she went back because she had a sense of destiny, she felt that her life was tied to that of Pakistan. He says she had a vision for Pakistan, but had done little during her two prime ministerships to carry it out. He says that despite her flaws she offered the best possibilities of any Pakistani leader at this time, she had a broad and enthusiastic popular following, and she would have been elected if she had lived.

- end of initial entry -

Steven Warshawsky writes:

I would love for someone to explain to me why Benazir Bhutto is widely considered to be (have been) an important, pro-Western political figure.

After reading the New York Times obituary, I am left with the impression of Bhutto as a corrupt plutocrat, whose popularity in the West is apparently premised on her supposedly feminist credentials (and reasonably pretty face, for a politician). As the Times reminds us in the very first paragraph of its obit: In 1988, Bhutto became “the first woman to be democratically elected to lead a modern Muslim country.” The Times further notes that Bhutto attended Harvard and Oxford, and was “the first woman to become president of the Oxford Union, the prestigious debating society.” Wow, what a great lady!

Yet the Times also tells us that “her accomplishments in office were few” and that she was “twice expelled from office amid a swirl of corruption charges.” It tells us that the American government was suspicious of her role in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. It tells us that she and her husband (called “Mr. 10 Percent” after his penchant for personally profiting from official business—but whom Bhutto referred to as the “Mandela of Pakistan”) were accused of stealing $1.5 billion dollars of government funds. It tells us that her father was hanged for ordering the murder of a political rival, and that two of her brothers were assassinated under circumstances that pointed to Bhutto’s potential involvement. Her own mother referred to Bhutto as a “viper.”

Nevertheless, Bhutto presented herself as the champion of the Pakistani “masses,” a believer in democracy and civil rights, and an opponent of Islamic extremism. (Which image will only be strengthened after her assassination, for which Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.) Presumably, had she made any concrete achievements in these areas, the Times would have highlighted them. But there is nothing about them in the obit.

Am I missing something here? Or is Bhutto’s popular image little more than a projection of modern, Western, feminist ideas onto this “woman of complex and often contradictory instincts”?

N. writes:

Very useful summarization of Bhutto’s life and politics. Thank you.

Ray G. from Dearbornistan writes:

The main thing I pull from the Bhutto murder is that I’m even more resolved to work to reduce Muslim immigration into the U.S. and the West in general. I’m just waiting for the Islamic apologists to say that the person or persons guilty are “not true Muslims”—yadda, yadda, yadda.

Political assassination is just business as usual in that part of the world. It’s their way. They don’t have constitutional governance, checks and balances, separation of powers, etc. They have heated, passionate, religious law and custom.

Indian living in the West writes:

Steven Warshawsky is right on all counts. All I would say is: in a snakepit like Pakistan, that is probably far and above the best you can ever hope to get in a politician.

The Western (and Indian) media’s eulogising of Bhutto has to do to some extent with the disproportionate influence of women in the media and also the liberal instinct to turn any slain politician into an immortal genius. Sorry to say this, but the perpetual media obsession with John F Kennedy and his worthless family is another prime example of this. Kennedy was a competent president but the media have turned him into one of the finest in history, which is nonsense.

In India, this kind of fetish extends to the Nehru/Gandhi family which never produced a single Prime Minister of quality. But the obsession with the family and its private lives continues ‘till this day. We have had a couple of very effective Prime Ministers who judged purely on performance were far better than anyone the Gandhi family produced. But to the urban cosmopolitan media, such things are irrelevant. It is the same with women too, to some extent. They become obsessed with dynastic stories.

It is something we have to learn to live with.

George writes (December 27):

Amid the ruins and carnage of our Pakistan policy, where exactly was one of VFR’s favorite characters, Condoleezza Rice? Has she been seen at all in public today? I typed in “Rice” and “Pakistan” into the Google news search function and I saw not one headline with Rice’s name in it. She apparently managed to mumble something today about “democracy” and then melted into the background.

I heard statements from the leading presidential dwarves in both parties on the network and cable news shows, but Rice seemed eerily absent. Confronted by danger, Rice has clicked her expensive high heels together and vanished into the ether of night like Dracula. Can you imagine what our Islamic enemies think of this?

Pakistan is teetering on civil war, how could she not be obligated to be front and center leading the diplomatic effort to rectify this situation. Could you imagine Powell or James Baker being absent in the public mind as she has been if either were secretary of state right now?

This is far from her only botching of U.S. foreign policy by the way. Her record includes—but is certainly not limited to—helping to bring to power Hamastan in the Gaza strip via neocon democracy promotion and making a borderline enemy of Putin’s Russia, a nation which should have been an obvious ally.

Going further, the central reason that she has shamed the nation by her performance (or if you will, non-performance) today is because she is a typical woman. Let’s face the facts, women almost never belong in serious leadership positions during a national crisis because typical women cannot react physically and mentally as decisively as men can.

In the U.S. Air Force, there is not one female fighter pilot in the entire fleet because women do not have the hand-eye coordination and reaction times that men do. There is a reason for this. God made men to lead and then He made women to follow. Adam preceded Eve. [LA replies: that’s only in Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, male and female are created together: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” And even in Genesis 2, it could be said that the female is superior to the male. The male is made out of the mere dust of the ground. The female is made of much finer stuff, she’s made out of the body of the man.]

Oh yes, in history there have been rare, exceptional female leaders who roe to the top such as Queen Elizabeth I and Thatcher. But they only came to power because they were baptized by fire and water in a strict, conservative, patriarchal society. Thatcher proved her abilities because she came to power in spite of the old Tory boys club. Because her path to power had extra obstacles due to her gender, she proved that she deserved to lead. But Rice did not earn, she merely was given her position.

In the age of liberalism and affirmative action, non-entities such as Bush’s ornamental housecat, Condoleezza, rise to the top. I blame the Baby Boomers for this. Previous generations of leaders would never have put up with Rice’s feminine antics. Can you imagine Eisenhower looking across the table and asking Rice for advice on how to end the Korean War—even if Rice were a white woman? This could not have happened in any other era but ours.

Fortunately, the age of silliness is coming to an end; and as the Islamic Other continues to challenge the West, liberalism will crack under the pressure of future crises, just as the liberal offspring, Rice, folded under pressure today.

Steven Warshawsky writes:

Here is a feminist puff piece on Bhutto, which is long on accolades but conspicuously short on facts. According to the author, Bhutto was “a modern-day hero who took the fight for us all to terrorism on the front line.” Really? What had she been doing to “fight” terrorism since she was ousted from power in 1996? The author apparently believes that mouthing modern feminist platitudes (which Bhutto apparently excelled at) is the “solution” to Islamic extremism. She even goes so far as to argue that “a woman’s touch” is/was needed to “save Pakistan” from the terrorists. What does this even mean? Do modern feminists truly believe that simply invoking the rhetoric of sexual equality will magically cure the world’s ills? Incredibly, the author’s bio describes her as a “security and terrorism consultant” (with advanced degrees in the field) who has worked with the British government. Ye gads!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2007 02:31 AM | Send