One of these client regimes was, until recently, Pakistan. The reason Pakistan was to be kept a dictatorship was simple.

'Since 9/11, when Musharraf changed sides in the "war on terror," US strategy has been predicated on a simple premise: only a dictator, backed by the army, can pursue that fight in Pakistan. A democratic government might be swayed by public opinion, which is opposed to NATO in Afghanistan and the hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal regions. '

And make no mistake, despite the fact that Musharraf has annoyed the Americans with his Emergency (although this is generally reported in the West as Musharraf 'seizing power', as though Pakistan was a democracy before the coup): 'Washington could reverse it (i.e. the coup) by using its huge financial clout--running at hundreds of millions in military aid a year--to bring the General to heel.... But, make no mistake, they are not about ousting the dictator from Pakistan's politics. They are America's way of keeping him and the army in power.'

It goes further than this. It's not just that Musharraf felt that he could seize power because he knew the Americans had to protect him. As Salon explains: 'Musharraf's coup spectacularly illustrates the Bush effect. His speech of Nov. 3, explaining his seizure of power, is among the most significant and revealing documents of this new era in its cynical exploitation of the American example. In his speech, Musharraf mocks and echoes Bush's rhetoric. Tyranny, not freedom, is on the march. Musharraf appropriates the phrase "judicial activism," the epithet hurled by American conservatives at liberal decisions of the courts since the Warren Court issued Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in schools, and makes it his own. This term -- "judicial activism" -- has no other source. It is certainly not a phrase that originated in Pakistan. "The judiciary has interfered: That's the basic issue," Musharraf said.

Indeed, under Bush, the administration has equated international law, the system of justice, and lawyers with terrorism. In the March 2005 National Defense Strategy, this conflation of enemies became official doctrine: "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." Neoconservative lawyers, in and out of the administration, have strenuously argued that the efforts to restore the Geneva Conventions, place detainees within the judicial process and provide them with legal representation amount to what they denigrate as "lawfare" -- a sneering reference to "welfare" and the idea that detainees are akin to the unworthy poor. Lawyers for detainees, meanwhile, are routinely insulted as "habeas lawyers," as though they were agents of terrorists and that arguing for the restoration of habeas corpus proves complicity "objectively" with terrorists. Rather than cite these neoconservative talking points directly or invoke the authority of Bush, whose feeble protestations he brushed aside, Musharraf slyly quoted Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus in Maryland and southern Indiana during the Civil War. (The U.S. Circuit Court of Maryland overturned his act. In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that civilians could not be tried before military tribunals when civil courts were functioning.) In Musharraf's version, Lincoln is his model, taking executive action in order to save the nation: "He broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary powers, he trampled individual liberties, his justification was necessity." Musharraf, of course, as he suspends an election, leaves out the rest of Lincoln, not least the difficult election of 1864, which took place in the middle of the Civil War.

But where did Musharraf get his warped idea of Lincoln as dictator and America as an example of tyranny? Not quite from diligent study of American history. According to a 2002 interview with Ikram Sehgal, managing editor of the Defense Journal of Pakistan, Musharraf received this notion from his reading of Richard Nixon's book "Leaders," published in 1994, in which Nixon discusses Lincoln's measures taken under extreme duress with ill-disguised admiration. Thus, for Musharraf, as for Cheney and Bush, Nixon's vision of an imperial president lies at the root of their actions in creating an executive unbound by checks and balances, unaccountable to "judicial activism." Since declaring a state of emergency, Musharraf has rounded up thousands of lawyers and shut down the courts, while halting offensive military action against terrorists. In the name of combating terrorism, even as parts of his government are in league with them, he launches an attack on those who profess democracy.'

At the moment there is much talk about the reversal of Emergency Rule, or a return to democracy, of Rice having 'harsh words' with Musharraf. It is safe to say that these can all be ignored. The brass tacks are: 'For now, Bush administration officials are unanimous in saying that American financial support for Pakistan will continue regardless of whether General Musharraf reverses course.'

And that will continue to be the case for the next few weeks, as Bush sees how things pan out. The problem is that it is unlikely that there is a plan 'B' for Pakistan. As pointed out above, genuine democracy will almost certainly lead to declining support in Pakistan for the Afghanistan mission and as that, currently (along with the 'creation' of Kurdistan in Iraq) is just about the only thing that Bush can hold onto and point to as a 'success' in his foreign policy without people laughing at him, he is highly unlikely to let that happen.