How to win friends and influence enemies: Threaten to "bomb them back to the stone age".

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan says the United States threatened to bomb his country back to the Stone Age after the 9/11 attacks if he did not help America's war on terror.

Musharraf says the threat was delivered by Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, to Musharraf's intelligence director, the Pakistani leader told CBS-TV's "60 Minutes."

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,' " Musharraf said in the interview to be shown Sunday on the CBS television network.

To anybody who remembers how heavy handed the American government was directly after 9-11 (with the blessing of most of the American people), this should not come as much of a shock.

I think that there was much arm twisiting of our friends and some outright threatening of our less friendly world leaders. I do not think that this should be excused because it was the beginning of the loss of US influence in the world. Bullies do not get respect, they get fear and that only lasts as long as nobody is willing to stand up to them. We have recently seen Iran and North Korea take our measure and refuse to cower before us and we are watching other, smaller countries, throw verbal stones at us with impunity. When these nations decide to organize against us we will be finished as a superpower. That is clearly what these countries are moving toward.

I am also a little worried that this threat came from Armitage. He might be held out to be "scape goated" like he was for the Plame outing, with nobody realizing that he must have been following somebody's orders. I have trouble believing that Colin Powell would send Armitage to threaten Pakistan, but who knows?