A blast from the past: Bush & Musharraf -- "he [Bush] did not ask the hard questions"

[Skidmore]

For the interested.

New York Times
November 18, 2007
Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — In the six years since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, joined President Bush in the fight against Al Qaeda, it has been an unlikely partnership: a president intent on promoting democracy and a military commander who seized power in a bloodless coup.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly called Gen. Musharraf “a friend.” In 2003, the president invited the general to Camp David, a presidential perk reserved for the closest of allies. Last year, at the general’s insistence, Mr. Bush risked a trip to Pakistan, jangling the nerves of the Secret Service by spending the night in the country presumed to be home to Osama bin Laden.

But now that the general has defied the White House, suspending Pakistan’s Constitution and imposing emergency rule, old tensions are flaring anew. Mr. Bush is backing away from the leader he once called a man of “courage and vision,” and critics are asking whether the president misread his Pakistani counterpart.

They said Mr. Bush — an ardent believer in personal diplomacy, who once remarked that he had looked into the eyes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and had gotten “a sense of his soul” — was taken in by the general, with his fluent English and his promises to hold elections and relinquish military power. They said Mr. Bush looked at General Musharraf and saw a democratic reformer when he should have seen a dictator instead....

[orpupilofnature57]

1. He saw another enabler to the Good ole Boy network.Shrub ruined

the economy ,he all of a sudden grew a brain on allies?