Hide-and-Seek Republicans

The games go on in the United States Senate.

At a press conference yesterday, John Kerry pleaded with Republican colleagues to come out of hiding and go public with the opposition to the war they have been expressing in private. If they did, he predicted, more than 60 Senators would vote for a change in policy

“This is the time, this is the moment,” Sen. Kerry said at a press conference. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe agreed. “We are at a crossroads between hope and reality,” she said.

White House marching orders were reflected, as they often are, on the Politico web site: “Republican leaders on Tuesday pounced on a newly released National Intelligence Estimate to argue that the increasingly powerful and ominous Al Qaeda presence justifies current troop levels in Iraq at least until September.”

Never mind that the Estimate was an exercise in vagueness, that it is the presence of American troops that brought Saudi suicide bombers to Iraq and that we are losing the hide-and-seek game of trying to uproot their increasing numbers. This White House uses the “kill your parents and ask for mercy because you’re an orphan” strategy without blinking.

It’s painful to see people sworn to serve the national interest keep playing political games with the lives of Americans in uniform.

The Friend of My Enemy Is My What?

This week 2000 Pakistani scholars bestowed their highest honor on Osama bin Laden, the title of Sword of Allah.

If it seems strange that the nation President Bush calls “a vital ally in the War on Terror” is awarding prizes to the world’s Terrorist-in-Chief, there is complexity involved here.

The Pakistanis really don’t like bin Laden that much, but they were peeved at “the British Government's decision to bestow the title of 'Sir' on blasphemer (Salman) Rushdie,” the council chairman explained.

The award to bin Laden was coupled with the statement that the knighting of Rushdie justified attacks in Britain by a federal minister associated with “militant madressahs” that train suicide bombers.

All this comes as President Pervez Musharraf, who has reaped billions in U.S. aid and had tea with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, is showing signs of backsliding in what President Bush calls his “progress toward democracy” by suspending the Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court who had complained about what the Christian Science Monitor describes as “hundreds of disappearances of Pakistanis, some suspected Islamic extremists but others human rights activists and representatives of ethnic minority populations.”

Those who are not as sophisticated in foreign affairs as Bush’s fresh-faced Neo-Cons may be a little puzzled by our continuing to provide F-16 fighter planes and other military hardware to a regime that seems to be playing on both sides of the terrorist game.

We never did get a straight story about why Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist had been selling its technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But then again we may not be as attuned as they are to subtleties of the Middle East.

How does that go: the enemy of my enemy is my friend who may also be the friend of my enemy but is still my friend if I keep giving him tokens of friendship and blind faith in whatever he does?