Kyrgyzstan's Revenge
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 Remember
Kyrgyzstan? Longtime readers of this
space will recall our extensive coverage of that country's "Tulip
Revolution," also dubbed the "Pink Revolution,"
way back in those heady days when George W. Bush's "global
democratic revolution" was said to be the wave of the future.
The so-called color revolutions in Georgia,
Ukraine,
and the landlocked and desperately poor Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan
were supposedly sparked by Bush's "fire
in the mind" – a phrase lifted out of Dostoyevsky's The
Possessed and used in one of the former president's more
unhinged perorations. In the case of Kyrgyzstan, however, it looks
like that fire has blown back in our faces.
 After
pouring all
sorts of resources, including
cash, into the coffers of the Tulip Revolutionaries, via overt
aid and covert payments to "nongovernmental
organizations," basically underwriting their campaign to
overthrow
the regime of then-President Askar
Akayev, what has the U.S. got to show for it? The Kyrgyz government
recently announced that it was unilaterally canceling
the contract that grants us the right to maintain the Ganci
air base at Bishkek's Manas airport, a key link in the increasingly
fragile supply lines that service U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Western news
reports invariably couple
this announcement with the recent conclusion of an aid pact with
the Russians guaranteeing $2 billion. U.S. government and NATO officials
openly accuse the Russians of interference, yet the real reasons
for the base closure are only mentioned in passing, if at all: the
2006 killing
of a Kyrgyz citizen by a U.S. soldier, one of 1,500 stationed in
and around the air base.
The soldier, Zachary Hatfield, shot and killed Alexander Ivanov,
a 42-year-old truck driver and father of two sons, at a checkpoint
where Ivanov was in the process of delivering fuel to Manas. Ivanov
had supposedly threatened Hatfield with a knife. A USA Today
report
includes this testimony from Ivanov's son and other truck drivers.
Read
the rest of the article
February
10, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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