George learns another lesson.

The right wing talking heads are turning themselves in circles over the Bhutto assassination. Unfortunately for Fox News and Laura Ingraham, who I attempted to watch last night, the events in Pakistan don't fit neatly into their talking points. Therefore, they jam the principal characters into their own black and white world views. The murderer has to be Al Qaeda, and the motive is somehow darkly related to Iraq, Afghanistan and nuclear weapons. The WSJ today lazily lumps the assassin into the new catch all bucket of the "jihadists". Musharraf's role as a bulwark against the terrorists is accepted as fact.

The fact that Bhutto's enemies may have had much more to do with ethnicity than politics, and the fact that the construct of Pakistan is revealed to be a loosely held confederation of warring tribes, is beyond the comprehension of the mouth breathing right. Bhutto and the Sindhi's from Southern Pakistan represent a challenge to the majority Punjabis, and many of the urbane upper class Punjabis are no doubt happy to see her go. The one institution that matters in Pakistan, the military, is dominated by the Punjabi majority, and their leader is Bhutto's rival, Musharraf. Along with the breakaway rebellions in Baluchistan, Bhutto's ascension was a threat to the power center in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. This assassination has the hallmarks of a mob hit, rather than an Al Qaeda operation.

The clearest casualty of the events is the Bush foreign policy. Bhutto, as it is becoming increasingly clear, was encouraged by the Bush administration to return to Pakistan to help shore up the Musharraf regime, which had lost it's legitimacy at home. From Firedoglake:

The WaPo's Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler report on the steps the Administration took to convince Bhutto to return to Pakistan, with the design of rescuing General Musharraf's discredited military regime by cloaking it with the quasi-legitimacy of a partnership with Benazir Bhutto.

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism. . . .

As President Pervez Musharraf's political future began to unravel this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him in power.

"The U.S. came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact," said Mark Siegel, who lobbied for Bhutto in Washington and witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes diplomacy. . . .

"U.S. policy is in tatters. The administration was relying on Benazir Bhutto's participation in elections to legitimate Musharraf's continued power as president," said Barnett R. Rubin of New York University. "Now Musharraf is finished."

The Bush Administration did not kill Benazir Bhutto; someone else did that. But it appears the Administration convinced her to go back to Pakistan to save a risky policy foolishly built on a despised, repressive military dictator to fight the US "war on terror." Now a courageous woman is dead, another nation is in chaos, the US is further discredited, it can't account for billions in military aid, and we still have an administration that remains a menace to everyone's security as long as they remain in office. But the Administration wants us to believe that only al Qaeda is responsible.