| Was is it just jetlag? Or could it have been simply tiredness after a long and gruelling schedule? Over-confidence perhaps? Or the misplaced expectation that the US press would extend the same warm, friendly and unrestrained goodwill to him that President Bush and his administration had been showing? |
| Whatever may have been the reason, the effect of President General Pervez Musharraf's response during his interview to The Washington Post could not have been more damaging to his image as an enlightened, moderate, modern-minded Muslim leader. It is an image carefully crafted by him and his spin-doctors; it is the uniformed mannequin President Bush and his team wish to project of the man they have adopted as their man in South Asia. |
| This abrasive encounter must have given President Musharraf painful lessons in how not to handle the media in America. The first is that the American press forgets nothing, and it forgives no-one. |
| It never forgave the black leader Jesse Jackson for his off-the-cuff reference to the Jewish-dominated city of New York as 'Hymie-town', thereby forfeiting what little chance he had of being the first credible candidate from his race for the US presidency. |
| It never forgot the middle-finger obscenity held up by Nelson Rockefeller, then a heartbeat away from the presidency as Vice-President to Gerald Ford, and whose successor he could have become. |
| It took on President Nixon over Watergate and caused him to be extracted, like some rotten tooth, from the Oval Office. In fact it is the very same paper - The Washington Post - that proved to be Nixon's nemesis and is now Musharraf's nightmare. [EXTRACT] |
| Published in DAWN 4 Oct., 2005, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
