More rubbish from John Laughland in the Guardian today. If Kyrgyz demonstrators say they want their country to be the 51st state of the US, that suggests that they have not been talking to the US Ambassador rather than that they have. And as usual, he totally ignores the real internal factors, such as stealing the elections in a country where people expected better, which led to the fall of the Kyrgyz government. (Though he undermines it slightly by quoting from a US official who claimed to be “promoting democracy” in Belarus in 2001 – yeah, look how effective the sinister external manipulations of the CIA etc have been there!)

The best reflective piece I’ve seen on Kyrgyzstan is from Transitions On Line, and the best blow-by-blow account from IWPR. Of course my own colleagues predicted all this last summer.