After imposing martial law disguised as a state of emergency, General Pervez Musharraf has cracked down on Pakistan’s judiciary, media, moderate political opposition and nascent civil society. His actions have been universally condemned by the international community. But instead of recognising the error of his ways, he feels “let down by the West” and “betrayed by the media.”

Musharraf is following in the footsteps of the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Manuel Noriega of Panama. In their final days, each one of these US-backed authoritarian rulers blamed the United States for failing to understand their compulsions and for creating the circumstances eventually leading to their downfall.

In the days to come, Musharraf and his remaining loyalists can be expected to whip up anti-Americanism in an effort to deflect blame for their predicament. Things were going well until the US demonstrated its legendary fickleness and showed a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf’s apologists will argue vehemently.

Musharraf recently spoke of Bhutto as “the darling of the West,” completely forgetting that he, and not Bhutto, was the recipient of billions of dollars in aid and personal praise from a long list of luminaries ranging from President Bush to Donald Rumsfeld. If, as Samuel Jackson asserted, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, then anti-Americanism is the last refuge of US-backed dictators.

The Shah’s problems were of his own making, as were those of Marcos. Manuel Noriega mistakenly believed that his status as US ally would allow him to get away with anything, including drug smuggling. Given the general misgivings about US foreign policy in third world countries, these rulers thought that all they had to do to retain US support was to raise the spectre of joining the ranks of America haters within their societies against whom they were originally supposed to help Washington. But the crash of dictatorships comes from mistaken domestic policies; it is not always a function of foreign policy.

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