The Bhutto Assassination

My first reaction[1] is that Condoleezza Rice should resign. She's been blundering around in over her head, and, in view of subsequent events, this is definitive:

Let me just say that we have an unfolding story in Pakistan. There appear to be authoritative sources, Pakistani television, saying that a state of emergency is going to be declared. We’ve not heard from President Musharraf, to my knowledge, yet.

I just want to be clear that the United States has made clear that it does not support extra-constitutional measures because those measures would take Pakistan away from the path of democracy and civilian rule. And whatever happens, we will be urging a quick return to a constitutional order, we will be urging that the commitment to hold free and fair elections be kept, and we’ll be urging calm on all the parties.

If she doesn't have the grace to resign, Bush should fire her.

Fat chance of either.

[1] I say 'my first reaction' because it's not clear who is responsible for the assassination. The above comments presume that it isn't Musharraf's people. It would be nice if we had an intelligence service capable of making that determination--correctly.

Follow-Up. From Andrew McCarthy at NRO:

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.
...
For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly.

The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening — and legitimizing — the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

Like Instapundit often says, read the whole thing.