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.
