I really admire Stephen Colbert; he used his comic license to make a laughing-stock out of the Bush administration and the mostly compliant press, its stupidity, and its hypocrisy.^[1] Unfortunately, we don’t need a Colbert to get comedy out of the US government.

For example, take Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent visit to the former Soviet Union. At one point in his …

Say goodbye to Uzbekistan, say hello to Kazakhstan.

The new US protege in Central Asia doesn’t have US military bases (yet) but it does have plenty of oil and other resources, as well as the largest economy in Central Asia (more than twice that of other Central Asian countries combined). It is also the nexus of Chinese economic inroads in the region, hence a place where US economic power in the former Soviet Union is likely to be …

Imperial rivals to the US are getting more powerful, and more capable of deterring the unfettered trampling of the globe that US policymakers are bent on.

That this is occurring is most obvious in the case of China. The eviction of US troops from Uzbekistan^[1] would not have happened if it wasn’t supported fully by Russia and China. The move followed closely on the heels of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s request that the …

We may be seeing the seeds of another “revolution” in a post-Soviet state, courtesy of the US State Department.

In what the Boston Globe calls walking the “diplomatic tightrope,” US officials have agreed to consider asylum requests for refugees from Uzbekistan fleeing after the violent crackdown in Andijan in May. Uzbekistan has been an important ally of the US because it allows the use of one of the first US airbases in Central Asia, and because the …

Just before G8 leaders met in Scotland to make themselves feel good about relieving African debt, and engage in handwringing on terrorism, two of the G8 countries (Russia and China) were busy snubbing another (the United States).

At the latest meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kyrgysztan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan), the growing US military presence in Central Asia has been seriously called into question. As quoted in an Associated Press article, a declaration …

The New Energy Wars have begun in earnest. The US-backed pipeline that brings oil from Azerbaijan westward has started pumping. Washington’s main goals are stated as US “energy independence” from the Middle East and political “independence” of the Caspian countries, which separated from the USSR in the early 1990′s. Both of those claims are either bogus, or distract from the real point.

So what’s the real point to these pipelines? First of all, of …

Published on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 by CommonDreams.org and by ZNet

In January 2004, the Chicago Tribune cited military sources in Washington planning a “spring offensive” on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan “that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network”[1] That offensive has clearly begun with recent troop deployments in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, also known as the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). But the troops are not …

A political analysis of Russia’s recent involvement in Chechnya and the reaction of West, written on 27th March 2000

“there are terrorists who kidnap innocent people by the hundreds and keep them in cellars, torture and execute them… Bandits of this kind — are they any better than Nazi criminals?”

—- Vladimir Putin, President of Russia

“Russian forces went on a killing spree in the Aldi district of Grozny, shooting at least sixty-two and possibly many more civilians who were waiting in the …