When a crisis erupts in some previously obscure part of the world, we typically see a profusion of instant "experts" in the media to help "analyze" the situation with frequently banal, and occasionally hilarious, results.
Bob Brown is a former state Senate leader from Montana, who made a trip in the mid-1990s to Kyrgyzstan, and he gives the readers of northwest Montana's Daily Inter Lake his take on the situation in Kyrgyzstan and with the Manas Air Base:
“I think the Russians are pretty enthusiastic about what is going on in Kyrgyzstan, and there is pretty good evidence they’re behind a lot of this stuff,” he said.
He suspects that the Kyrgyz people “are not sophisticated enough” to operate the base and that Russia would jump at the chance to take control of Manas.
“I’m not sure that the unrest in Kyrgyzstan is an entirely local thing,” Brown said. “I think it probably has been encouraged by the bad guys in the Muslim world [i.e. al-Qaida terrorists] and Russia.”
No comment needed for readers of this blog.
More egregious, because of its reach and ostensible status as "the most trusted name in news," is this report from CNN.
Watch until the very end to see an amazing map blooper. But even before that, there are more headscratchers in that report than I can catalog. But for our purposes here at The Bug Pit, I'll just point out his analysis that because the air base is just 14 miles away from Bishkek, the violence could "trouble" Manas. Anyone who has read a single article on the effect that the events of Kyrgyzstan could have on the air base knows that the issue is NOT whether rioters are physically going to go to the base and smash up the planes or whatever this guy thinks might happen. Sigh.
"Excellent explanation," says Wolf Blitzer.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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