Prizing "stability" over democracy: That doesn't sound like a rhetorical trope of President Bush, does it? Certainly not when he's waxing apologetic about the Arab and Muslim worlds.

"For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice said at the American University in Cairo last June, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East--and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

What about Pakistan?