For a democracy, the US has an interesting friends-list.

We were good friends with Saddam, and happy to sell him weapons when Reagan was president.

We were happy to go to war to protect the royal family of Kuwait's oil and investments.

The House of Saud are invited to all of our best parties and always get the VIP treatment.

Now we have Pakistan. We are best buds with Mr Musharraf, who holds the interesting positions of both President and top general. He is sort of like Bush+Cheney rolled into one, which makes his country anything but a democracy. By holding Osama in his country, Musharraf is able to get weapons and aid from us while declaring marshall law and disbanding his supreme court.

You almost feel bad for Castro and Gaddafi - just about the only two dictators on earth that we arent on our friends list. (Although we seem to be cutting Gaddafi some slack now that he has lost his hair and educated his sons at Oxford, or was it Cambridge?)

And then you have the Kurds. They are the friend that invite to parties but hope they dont actually show up and embarrass you in front of the cool friends.

A race of people with a common heritage and geography who were unfortunate enough to be born in Iraq, Turkey and Iran - after the British empire drew the borders. All they really want is a homeland to call their own, which ought to seem pretty reasonable to Americans but oddly does not.

While we helped create Israel and Liberia so that those people could have a homeland, Bush was happy to declare Kurdish freedom fighters "terrorists" who are the "enemy of the US". So much for Freedom and Democracy.

I wonder what we will do when Turkey invades Iraq...

Thousands Protest Emergency Rule in Pakistan

Opposition groups said thousands of their supporters have been arrested in the wake of President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule this weekend. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and two experts consider the political unrest in Pakistan

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