NEW YORK, Sept 14: “When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to calm Muslims by denouncing the video, she was unwittingly playing along with the ruse the radicals set up,” former Pakistan ambassador Husain Haqqani wrote in a column for the Wall Street Journal about protests in Muslim countries against the film, Innocence of Muslims.

Chiding Clinton, Mr Haqqani wrote: “The United States would have been better off focusing on the only outrage that was of legitimate interest to the American government: the lack of respect — shown by a complaisant Egyptian government and other Islamists — for US diplomatic missions.”

One independent observer commented that “the column was perhaps aimed at pleasing hawks in the ranks of Republican leader Mitt Romney, who has been advocating a tougher line against the Egyptian government and the protesters”.

“Protests orchestrated on the pretext of slights and offences against Islam have been part of Islamist strategy for decades. Iran’s ayatollahs built an entire revolution around anti-Americanism,” Husain Haqqani said in his column.

The former ambassador further wrote: “While the Iranian revolution was underway in 1979, Pakistan’s Islamists whipped up crowds by spreading rumours that the Americans had forcibly occupied Islam’s most sacred site, the Kaaba, or the Grand Mosque. Pakistani protesters burned the US embassy in Islamabad.”