Rick Rozoff - April 7, 2010

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was deposed five years after and in the same manner as he came to power, in a bloody uprising.

Elected president two months after the so-called Tulip Revolution of 2005 he helped engineer, he was since then head of state of the main transit nation for the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon secured the Manas Air Base (as of last year known as the Transit Center at Manas) in Kyrgyzstan shortly after its invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001 and in the interim, according to a U.S. armed forces publication last June, “More than 170,000 coalition personnel passed through the base on their way in or out of Afghanistan, and Manas was the transit point for 5,000 tons of cargo, including spare parts and equipment, uniforms and various items to support personnel and mission needs.

“Currently, around 1,000 U.S. troops, along with a few hundred from Spain and France, are assigned to the base.” [1]

The White House’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke paid his first visit in his current position to Kyrgyzstan – and the three other former Soviet Central Asian republics which border it, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – in February and said “35,000 US troops were transiting each month on their way in and out of Afghanistan.” [2] At the rate he mentioned, 420,000 troops annually.

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F. William Engdahl, January 30, 2010

President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.

Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

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He may have inspired leaders from Hitler to Bush

Tristram Hunt - September 17, 2009

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else,” wrote John Maynard Keynes (a man who should know) in 1936. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

One such scribbler currently ruling the world is the Edwardian geographer Sir Halford Mackinder. Oxford professor, MP and imperialist, Sir Halford was the intellectual architect of modern geopolitics and the thinker who put the idea of “the Heartland” at the centre of global diplomacy.

Today, he is more relevant than ever. As Russia and Georgia continue their hot and cold war over South Ossetia, as the Kremlin attacks the European Union for its “eastern partnership” policy towards Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, and as America and Russia tussle over influence in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, Mackinder’s realpolitik vision is at its most active for half a century. Few recall his name, but our foreign policy is now played out in his shadow.

Mackinder’s fame comes from a rather dry lecture delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, entitled The Geographical Pivot of History. In it he made two dynamite propositions. First, that the globalised world — crisscrossed by steam, telegram and train — had become a closed system. Since there was nowhere left to colonise, the world had become a unitary space with every strategic advance by one nation necessitating a rival power to retreat. In this closed geographical context, diplomacy was a zero-sum game and geopolitics meant successfully squaring political power with geographical setting.

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Google: Brzezinski + Mackinder