I first took notice of Musharraf when I saw his televised speech about a week after 9-11. He spoke in very modest surroundings, with a portrait of Kemal Atatürk hanging behind him on the wall. Cokie Roberts afterwards called it the finest speech she had ever heard. As her father was Cong. Hale Boggs, and she was raised in D.C., this is no small praise.

I recently went looking for that speech and discovered Musharraf’s website. Quite something. PDF downloads in English of all his major speeches. Even 1024×768 & 800×600 wallpapers.

http://presidentofpakistan.gov.pk/PresidentialSpeeches.aspx

His 9-11 speech, covers all the bases and justifies helping the US to his countrymen.

http://presidentofpakistan.gov.pk/SpeechAddressList.aspx

He has several irons in the fire. A good article from Pakistan’s perspective in Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GI01Df01.html

After the likes of Benazir Bhutto & Nawaz Sharif, he looks to me like The Man on the White Horse.

Quite an interesting article on Iran’s imperialist ambitions, albeit more in the ME than Eurasia. The author has a series of articles available on the Asia Times website and quite a few recent ones have been on demographic change in Islamic countries.

Two observations:

It’s kind of amazing how U.S. policy toward the former Soviet reublics never really seems to get any better no matter who is in power in D.C. We seem to have a knack for repeating the same, short-sighted, moronic mistakes from Bush I. to Clinton to Bush II. Perhaps it is time to bring in some outside regional experts into the NSC and get some fresh views on American relations with all CIS nations and what we hope to accomplish with our policies.

Secondly, in the interests of global democracy, perhaps we need a crash program to clone Vaclav Havel and export the clones to newly democratizing states. The local guys have a disheartening capacity for amateurish political incompetence and corruption.

Only on Coming Anarchy could I have read this line!

Re: Ukraine… due to Communism (and it’s the same in many post-communist in name countries), many people look to the president for leadership, maybe more than to the PM, although executive power rests with the PM and the president role is smaller.

It’s more about power figures and less about acknowledgment of proper constitutional mandates. (Imagine Americans putting their faith in Dick Cheney, in a way)

I think that the “orange revolution” will live on, via Yushchenko, just because people will see him as hard on corruption, without realizing that his constitutional mandate is not one of a dictator. (there’s only so little he can do himself, without a strong, allied PM)

The same thing is sort of happening in Romania: president Basescu is widely popular (a little less in recent weeks) and if you ask, most people will tell you that they trust him to get things done, as if they wouldn’t know that it’s the PM that does all the executive work. (In Romania, according to the Belgian model, the president is a representative of the people… he watches over governmental institutions and stomps his foot, and in the worst case he gets to demand the change of the executive… more or less)

Romania went through a cabinet reshuffling and minor scandals yet the “orange revolution” seems to go strong still, fueled by a nosy president which often defies the constitutional limits of his job.
The winter will kill it, unfortunatelly, as far as I can tell. (It’s morally imperative to fight the crypto-communists in the opposition, but not when we’re freezing.)

The idea of an “orange revolution” is all about fighting communism but that’s not really going to happen because corruption, nepotism and state abuse are so much part of the social fiber of eastern europe that change is a matter of generations, not legislation. On a simillar note, eastern europe lacks liberals, and I mean true “classical liberals” or libertarians, people who knew who Bastiat, Popper, Mises or Rand were. Most members of the PNL (National Liberal Party) are as neo-keynesian, collectivist and welfarist as those damn crypto-communists they’re supposed to fight, on ideological grounds.