This article talks about the state of the asian countries that used to be part of the USSR (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan,Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan). It notes that if there were any signs of democracy in these countries, it’s gone now. The article does leave something out when it says:
In the last three years in these former vassals of the Kremlin, the exuberant vision of nurturing pluralistic societies and governments responsive to popular will — enunciated by President Bush’s public calls for democratization — has met so many obstacles that it has been quietly recalibrated. Throughout the region, journalists and opposition figures have been harassed, threatened, beaten, imprisoned and sometimes killed. American policy has accepted less ambitious goals.
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Two months after Mr. Akayev fled, in May 2005, a prison break by inmates who said they had been falsely tried by Uzbek authorities triggered an anti-government demonstration in the Uzbek city of Andijon. “Freedom!” the crowd chanted, as the authorities set a cordon around them.
Uzbek soldiers struck back before nightfall, dispersing the demonstrators with machine-gun fire. At least several hundred unarmed people were killed, survivors said, including wounded civilians who were executed in the street.
The West condemned the violence. But isolation weakened Mr. Karimov only to a degree. He blocked independent investigation of his government’s conduct and evicted the United States military. He also tightened relations with China and the Kremlin, his former patron. Both implicitly endorsed his decision to turn guns on the crowds.
The two pieces that this misses are: if Bush had been promoting democracy, why was the US in Uzbekistan before the crackdown (it’s not like it was a democracy before this or even showing signs it was moving in that direction?; notice that the US didn’t leave, they were kicked out (would the US have left if not, probably not given its value in terms of Afghanistan). For the most part, the Bush administration’s support for democracy has only been rhetoric. When push comes to shove, they ignore it (in Gaza they ignored the democratically elected government; in Venezuala they were happy to endorse a coup against Chavez; Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other dictator-led countries are ok, while the more democratic Iran is evil. This type of thing isn’t unique to this administration, but claiming that promoting democracy was ever Bush’s primary goal is wrong.
