Pervez Musharraf Lincoln

It isn't enough that Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, general and twice-over coup master, has just suspended Pakistan's Constitution, fired 12 of the nation's 17 judges, including the popular chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry, shut down private media, and declared, in his usual after-coup television appearance (roundabout midnight this time, 2:45 a.m. back in October 1999), that Pakistan's mostly imaginary trot toward full civil democracy would be more imaginary still. No. Not enough, all that.

Musharraf, all 5-11'' of him, had to go and compare himself to Abraham Lincoln.

“I would at this time venture to read out an excerpt of President Abraham Lincoln," he told his skeptical audience, "specially to all my listeners in the United States. As an idealist, Abraham Lincoln had one consuming passion during that time of crisis, and this was to preserve the Union… towards that end, he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties. His justification was necessity and explaining his sweeping violation of Constitutional limits he wrote in a letter in 1864, and I quote, ‘My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of preserving by every indispensable means that government, that Nation of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution?’”

Have I mentioned that he suspended the Constitution? "With all my sincerity, whatever I'm doing is in the interest of Pakistan," he went on to say, before switching to Urdu to appease restless Muslims about his perception as a Western stooge. Whatever he's done in his eight years of rule and misrule has been, of course, in the interest of Pervez Musharraf first.

You can see the televised address here. And see my profile of Pervez Musharraf here