After a decade of alleged democracy promotion; after a decade of the sort of media manipulation and calculated doublespeak that would make Kim Jong-Il blush; after millions of destroyed lives in the name of “freedom,” the leadership of the United States has finally meandered casually off a cliff of sanity that should deeply shame every single citizen of this country.

            Pakistan’s recent election of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party and the party of Nawaz Sharif, granting a near complete shut-out to General Musharraf should have sent a clear message to the administration. Not for the first time, the democratic process in a client state has attempted to take power back from a US allied dictator, and not for the first time has the US failed to stand with the will of the people.

            Instead of helping to usher General Musharraf out of the Pakistani public spotlight and allowing the democratic process to guide Pakistan into the next stumbling steps to its freedom, our government has forcefully come out in favor of keeping Musharraf as a major player in the future government. The people of Pakistan are understandably outraged by this turn of events. Their election represents a complete rejection of our man in Pakistan, and while I recognize that years of unwavering military and political support might be hard to look past, we must quickly rearrange our priorities lest we find another country in the Near East that is ready to reject us as thoroughly as Iran after our meddling there.

             This blind and outrageous slap to the face of America’s stated principles only serves to underscore the fundamental hypocrisy of the nation’s current course. So desperately do we need a genuine change in policy, so completely hollow is our every claim to the ethical high ground, that we have lost every right to global leadership. The Pakistani election is more than just a simple referendum on the government of Mr. Musharraf, it is an attack on the failed policy of our government as well. Remember that Mr. Musharraf couldn’t have held power without the support of the US. The presidency of George Bush has laid bare everything that is wrong with the machinery of American government. It has highlighted our moral, intellectual, and cultural failings. It has shown that, as a nation, we have lost that creative energy that allowed us to take our place at the head of the international table. Whether we can reclaim it is in the hands of our leaders and their willingness to make difficult changes.

            Good foreign policy involves a great deal more than simply bullying the leaders of all nations great and small. In this increasingly interconnected world, with its increasingly multipolar sources of economic, intellectual, and political power, the United States simply must stop playing like our relations are solely the domain of diplomats behind closed doors. The whole world watches what we do, and if we sincerely believe that we can continue to act and use our power with out regarding the feelings of others, then our leaders are right: the world will become more dangerous every day.

            No, we must seriously step up our efforts to integrate with the rest of the world and actually keep to our principles in a consistent manner. If we really wish to hold ourselves out as the opponents of tyranny, we should make a priority of doing so without crippling the people we would claim to be protecting. The notion of a war for liberation should seem morally inconsistent. After all, freedom is useless if you’re dead, and the more than two million Iraqis who have been so far killed or displaced by this war have lost everything from our misguided efforts to liberate them.