As David Rohde reported in The Times today, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, speaking on Pakistani television about his decision to suspend his country’s Constitution, compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.

The general, dressed in civilian clothes, quoted from Abraham Lincoln and cited the former president’s suspension of some rights during the American Civil War as justification for his own state of emergency.

Speaking in English, General Musharraf began his discussion of Lincoln as follows:

“I would at this time venture to read out an excerpt of President Abraham Lincoln, specially to all my listeners in the United States. As an idealist, Abraham Lincoln had one consuming passion during that time of crisis, and this was to preserve the Union… towards that end, he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties. His justification was necessity and explaining his sweeping violation of Constitutional limits he wrote in a letter in 1864, and I quote, ‘My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of preserving by every indispensable means that government, that Nation of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution?'”

Below is video, posted on YouTube, of this part of Gen. Musharraf’s address. The full text of Abraham Lincoln’s famous letter — in which he also wrote “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” — is posted on the Library of Congress Web site, in Lincoln’s own handwriting, here, here and here.