“War is God’s way of teaching geography to Americans.”
— Lt. Col. Stan Giles
“I’d never even heard of Kyrgyzstan.” — USAF Capt.
Dale Linafelter
As dated (and accurate) as Colonel Giles’ maxim is the unspoken
adage that war is America’s way of teaching democracy to
foreigners. Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines,
Afghanistan, and Iraq have made it so. Spreading freedom
without violence, however, has been a flop since before
the invention of the international community. For those outside the
European garden, the League of Nations proved that if Ethiopia or
Manchuria were the world’s business, they were also the prerogative
of their aggressors. What sunk the League was the belief among
civilized peoples that tyrannies only bothered their own subjects,
and that war and peace were the “on” and “off” of a single switch.
Not until after World War Two did this mythos begin to wane. But
until 1945, armed conflicts were announced like weddings, and
neutrality meant peace with a country fighting some other war.
Today, it’s formal peace and declared war that are the rarities
— while outside the garden, the rejects run wild. Inspections,
sanctions, threatened sanctions, six-party talks, insurgency, and
occupation thrive in an international jungle where the only norm is
there are no norms.
Through the chaos breaks an unlikely headline: Revolution in
Kyrgyzstan. The only lay Americans who knew Kyrgyzstan before last
week were the ones stationed there, at Manas Air Field — where
Giles, Linafelter and 1,150 other servicemen live in a tent city
next door to China in a place where Russia still maintains bases
and winter splits the nation by closing down its one major
road.
Nothing in Kyrgyzstan is significant. Uzbek President
Karimov got face time with Paul O’Neill, courtesy of the geography
of oil. Distinguished neither in resources, climate, population,
nor culture, what keeps Kyrgyzstan on the map is mere location.
Malicious militias camp out in the nearby Ferghana Valley.
Afghanistan, China, India, Russia, and Iran are a heartbeat or a
reconnaissance drone away. In central Asia, nowhere is more central
than Kyrgyzstan. This also makes it a boondocks. It would take a
revolution on Antarctica to rival the non-event that the Kyrgyz
Spring should have been. But Kyrgyzstan is not just Kyrgyzstan in
2005. Once a bore, Kyrgyzstan has become a Democratic Domino.
From Afghanistan to Georgia, Ukraine, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon,
and Egypt, freedom has hopscotched at a dervish’s pace. Not even
the Saudis are safe anymore, and the Kyrgyz are now a proof. The
headline “Freedom Marches Thru Kyrgyzstan” is the geopolitical
equivalent of a star-making human-interest story on the local news.
Kyrgyzstan belongs to a theory, a policy, a political talking
point. It is a rallying cry for the Natan Sharansky Fan Club. “Even
In Kyrgyzstan” is the ultimate comeback against naysayers of
“Asiatic” democracy. “Even here” — where most people look
Mongolian and Locke and Rousseau are not mentioned in the cafes.
Wait — do the Kyrgyz even have cafes? Even better. Behold the
easternmost democratic revolution in the history of the world —
pulled off without modern Western prods. If it can happen in
Bethlehem and Beirut without debt restructuring, why not in
Bishkek, too?
Because it might not be happening. Dueling parliaments do not a
democracy make. Hurling sticks at your former President is almost
as unprofessional in the enterprise of freedom as his announcement
that the “rumors” of his resignation “are false and
intentional.”
Yet when the people cheer that “freedom has finally come to us,”
who has the gall to say “easy come, easy go”? It’s true that a
country waving its hands and shouting is a mob, not a movement. But
it’s also true that passion is paramount. The best way never to
fail is never to try — and that goes for freedom, too.
“The Bush administration,” Christopher Hitchens claims, “retains
its capacity to startle, mainly because it has redefined the lazy
term ‘conservative’ to mean someone who is impatient with the
status quo.” The elevation of a haphazard, half-peaceful revolution
in a global backwater to the level of headline news shows just how
right he is: Kyrgyzstan is news today because Georgia and Ukraine
were news yesterday, and yesterday’s news is still news because the
grand strategy of the USA is to help dissident populations under
active threat of tyranny push themselves past the tipping point
into freedom.
This policy is genius and self-expedience, but its
implementation is also humanely visionary at the edge where
boldness threatens hubris and risks recklessness. The
newsworthiness of Kyrgyzstan is news on its own terms.
Action is on the breeze, fruits of the dare or gamble or
premonition of some “conservatives” for whom a new word —beyond
neocon — might be needed to describe them.
