During coverage of Benazir Bhutto’s funeral on Radio 5 Live yesterday, a listener asserted–via text message–that the US government had paid Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to murder Bhutto. Which explains why the USA/UK cajoled her to return to Pakistan and participate in a dodgy political process in the first place–obvious innit? Such conspiracy theories are of a piece with those few individuals on the rim of rationality who declare that Bhutto and others like her, ‘deserved’ her fate*, and who like the Graiai, share but one eye and tooth between them: an ‘orientalist’ view that events and actors halfway around the world are cyphers–that domestic politics do not exist except as they mirror US/European foreign policy.

How could it be, asked the talking heads, that Bhutto could be murdered in Rawalpindi, a place which has more ISI agents per square metre than anywhere else in Pakistan? Given that the ISI has a long history of interference in domestic politics, and some elements are notoriously sympathetic to the religious right, while others seek to shore up the interests of the Pakistan military, that question is surely rhetorical.

In a sympathetic article in International Viewpoint, Tariq Ali states unequivocally that Bhutto’s murder is a disaster for Pakistan,

Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies–both while she was in office and more recently–are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again. An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order–and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country’s supreme court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law?

and concludes that the best hope for breaking the cycle of ‘military leadership promising reforms degenerat[ing] into tyranny [and] politicians promising social support to the people degenerat[ing] into oligarch[y]‘, is a refoundation of the PPP as a party which speaks for the political and social needs of the people.

[A] modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done.

Opponents of the Musharraf government and Bhutto supporters have criticised the dictatorship’s recent crackdown on democracy protesters and human rights activists as having signalled a reluctance to confront religious extremism, and effectively greenlighting the attack on Benazir Bhutto. Members of The Struggle tendency of the PPP claim responsibility lies with the ‘mullahs’:

[T]he threads of the conspiracy undoubtedly reach high up. The so-called Islamic fundamentalists and jihadis are only the puppets and hired assassins of reactionary forces that are entrenched in the Pakistani ruling class and the state apparatus, lavishly funded by the Pakistan Intelligence Services (ISI), drug barons with connections with the Taliban, and the Saudi regime[.]

The dictatorship meanwhile, is blaming religious extremists, and wishes we look no further.

Afterword: Another site has used the Bhutto murder as ammunition for the most shabby, vile attempt at sectarian point-scoring in a sordid and insignificant toilet-fight. The debasement and corruption of political debate continues apace.

* The sort of degenerate for whom all violence is revolutionary, who celebrates the murder of a woman for being in the wrong party and for daring to outrage public ‘morals’ with her ‘immodesty’, or who would justify the massacre of 60 worshippers and the mutilation of another 200 in an attempt to assassinate a former Musharraf cabinent member during Eid-ul-Adha, as justifiable means towards ends–but what horrific ends.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, by Bernard-Henri Levy:

They have killed a woman. A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.

A woman who made a point not only of holding rallies in one of the world’s most dangerous countries, but did so with her face uncovered, unveiled — the exact opposite of the shameful, hidden women, the condemned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by these apostles of a world without women.

They killed a Jew, Daniel Pearl. They killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the great guerilla leader against the Taliban, a moderate Muslim, a cultivated man and free spirit. They tried for years to kill a man, Salman Rushdie, who dared say that to be a man is also sometimes to choose your own destiny….

And now they have killed Benazir Bhutto — killed her because she was a woman, because she had a woman’s face, unadorned yet filled with an unswerving strength, because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists) floats over the human face of women. They killed this woman incarnation of hope, of spirit, of the will to democracy, not only in Pakistan, but in all the lands of Islam.

The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.

We should have seen, standing behind Benazir’s body, as they once did behind Anwar Al-Sadat’s and Itzhak Rabin’s, the largest possible number of government leaders and heads of state, to make the funeral a global demonstration on behalf of the values of democracy and peace.

We would have wanted the French president to interrupt his vacation to bid farewell to this great lady, now a martyr, on her last voyage. But no. The man who just rolled out the red carpet for Moammar Gadhafi contented himself with a short communiqué, not responding to those who had begged him to find a gesture or at least words which would honor this assassinated heroine. Beyond Mr. Sarkozy, the entire community of democratic heads of state has been astonishingly moderate, prudent, indeed pusillanimous.

Still.

From now on Benazir Bhutto will be much more than a chief of state. She has become a symbol. She has become, as did Ahmed Shah Massoud and Daniel Pearl, a standard bearer.

All those who have not yet given up on freedom in the land of Islam must gather behind that standard. Her name must become another password, bloody but beautiful, for those who still believe that the good genius of Enlightenment will win out over the evil genius of fanaticism and crime.

It is for us, citizens of Europe and the United States, to mourn, to display the grief that our leaders have, at least for the moment, shamefully avoided.

The column is behind the Journal’s firewall, but I was able to access it, once, through Google News.

Update: Free link here.

No wonder it’s called the dismal science. BBC economics editor Evan Davis has looked into his crystal ball, and on his blog forecast hard times ahead. Incisive analysis and persuasive argument? No, more poring over entrails and hunch, by the look of it, which means there is at least a 50% chance that Davis is right.

Part of me – the grumpy old bastard whose favourite English word is Schadenfreude – hopes for an almighty economic crash. This would certainly teach a lesson to Gordon Brown and his followers who built up our service-centred and credit-obsessed economy, and those talentless shits who have made a killing in the housing market, and now live off the profits of property speculation.

But then I remember that recessions hurt everyone, and the majority do not deserve such suffering.

I suppose it’s naïve of me to hope for a quick crash which empties the bulging bank accounts and pension funds of the new indolentsia, followed by a solid economic restructuring that creates real jobs and real wealth. A fantasy, maybe, but one can dream.

Now available…

New Hitchens — an article about English Eccentrics.