Opinion (Robert Scheer): Coddling Pakistan

Above: The headquarters of the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, Pakistan, where Dr. Khan (left) developed Pakistan's nuclear weapons, became the center of a global nuclear trading network, beginning in the 1980s.

AS IRAQ continues to disintegrate, and our top generals and in-country ambassador predict that U.S. troops will need to die there for decades in order to prevent a full-scale regional bloodbath, it is important to recall the reasons why we got into this mess. The marker of what will go down in history as "Bush's folly" is that this idiot of a president invaded a country that had absolutely nothing to do with terrorists attacks on the United States on 9/11 or threatening America with WMD while coddling the military junta in Pakistan, which was guilty on both counts.

(For newspaper editors inclined to strike my reference in this syndicated column to our "idiot president" as excessively pejorative, I refer them to one definition of "idiot" in Webster's New Riverside University Dictionary: "being unable to guard against common dangers and being incapable of learning connected speech.")

Two news stories this week underscore the extreme irrationality and utter moral depravity of the Bush administration in exploiting the 9/11 attack to justify the invasion of Iraq. They both concern Pakistan, the close ally of the Taliban government in Afghanistan when it hosted Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network. And, as opposed to Iraq, Pakistan did have WMDs and facilitated their proliferation to "rogue nations." Both examples provide damning evidence that President Bush cared not a whit about WMDs or about preventing another 9/11 attack, because the danger of both existed in Pakistan, which he befriended -- rather than in Iraq, which he invaded.

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