Never mind the mystery of who killed Benazir Bhutto and what method was used. There’s an emerging chorus of conflicting opinions about just who the late prime minister was. Liberator? Operator? Criminal?

Bernard-Henri Levy’s encomium in today’s Wall Street Journal skips beatification and plunges straight into sainthood:

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.

Thomas Barnett brings Ms. Bhutto back down to earth:

Bhutto, despite our mythologizing of her past rule and future potential, was not going to fix Pakistan. As such, her passing matters only to the extent it creates short-term instability. But, in the end, I don’t expect to change much about the correlation of forces right now in Pakistan.

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens offers tempered admiration:

The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father . . .

It’s hard to beat Mark Steyn’s early assessment:

She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be—though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes.

Steyn is particularly dead-on about the West. We’ll never know what Benazir Bhutto would have meant to Pakistan’s future, but perhaps we should re-calibrate our expectations about what’s next—and start by softening the sharp lines along which we demonize or celebrate Pervez Musharraf.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 11:42 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.