Thousands of terrified Uzbeks fled for the border Saturday but hundreds angrily returned to the square where police fired on demonstrators to put down an uprising against country’s authoritarian U.S.-allied leader. A human rights monitor said about 200 people were killed.

Protesters overran government buildings Saturday in an Uzbek village on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, torching police vehicles and beating border guards, a Kyrgyz official said.

The fresh clashes broke out in the village of Korasuv, some 31 miles east of Andijan, the site of violence Friday that witnesses said left hundreds of people dead. Uzbek police and tax police offices were set on fire, and police cars were vandalized, a Kyrgyz official said on condition of anonymity. Uzbek helicopters were seen circling over the town.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov said 10 government troops and “many more” protesters were killed but refused to be more specific. He spoke at a news conference in the capital Tashkent a day after the unprecedented clashes in his tightly controlled country, which he has led since before the 1991 Soviet collapse. ~MSNBC

Thank goodness the glorious Kyrgyz revolution deposed a real physicist-tyrant in Akayev, whose overthrow was notable for the refusal of the “dictator” to open fire on his own people, even as they looted, killed and and destroyed a great deal of private and public property. Happily, Our Man in Tashkent, Islam Karimov, and his army have no compunctions about slaughtering anyone. Uzbekistan is not one of the countries Washington wants to see “liberated,” as it knows full well that Uzbek Islamists are waiting in the wings to exploit any instability.

There is no substantial difference between the popular raiding of prisons and government buildings in Andijan and those that took place in Belgrade and Tbilisi or the mass illegal assembly blocking the streets of Kiev, as all were cases of direct action in violation of the law. The difference is that this time the danger of popular riot was made explicit, as the crowd sought to free alleged members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a prominent central Asian Islamist movement with a strong presence in Uzbekistan, and Karimov reminded his subjects what really counts in politics: power and force. The pathetic, mewling response of the White House to these events was typical: “The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government. But that should come through peaceful means, not through violence.”

What these anarcho-tyrants and neo-anarchists seem not to understand, even though they want to ignite fire in the minds of men like Dostoevsky’s revolutionary Verkhovensky, is that subject peoples in the world, encouraged by democratist nonsense and error spewed by the President, come to the same extreme conclusions that militarists in this country have reached: dictators can only be met with strength and force. Whether or not this is true, deluded, fanatical minds, or simply desperate minds, are all too willing to believe it, as it gives them perfect license for violence. (Let us not dwell on the fact that peaceable assembly, legitimate protest or anything as exotic as the rule of law are unknown in practice to the people of Uzbekistan in as many generations as one cares to count.) To invoke violence when the government wishes to depose other countries’ dictators, claiming that there is no other way, and then expect those actually living under the dictators to assemble peaceably and wait to be scattered and crushed is the normal kind of blinkered moral idiocy that passes for wisdom at the White House.

One reason why Tbilisi, Kiev and Bishkek did not become killing grounds as well is because the terrible “dictators” were dull, highly corrupt but largely non-violent apparatchiks. Another is that ultimately they were elected politicians, who would have gained nothing from violent repression. The last reason is that, in two cases, the countries were historically Christian and significantly Westernised and in the other the ruling elite was the most Westernised of all the people. (The aftermath of Akayev’s overthrow is still unfolding, incidentally, as ethnic Russians are being forced to leave or are fleeing in fear from Kyrgyzstan at an accelerating rate.) What this Uzbekistan massacre represents is the likely future of democratisation efforts in much of the rest of the Islamic world: Tiananmen is the probable outcome, not the fall of the Berlin Wall. The peoples of the Islamic world will be led to believe, if they do not already, that they should be “free” and “democratic,” whatever these mean to them, and they will meet superior force each and every time.

We know the real tyrant when he must repress his subjects to retain order and hold power, and naturally the one real tyrant we have witnessed in the last two years in the former Soviet Union is one of our allies. A realist internationalist policy might not care (after all, what are a few hundred dead bodies between allies?), but how does it necessarily profit America to be associated with this butcher? Would an America First foreign policy ally with this villain to no clear advantage of the United States? Absolutely not. The Uzbek alliance is simply buttressing Washington’s larger plans for central Asian hegemony and serves no legitimate U.S. national interest. The alliance and our military base there should be dissolved forthwith.

What an America First foreign policy would do is not encourage people around the world to rise up or revolt with false promises of our support. This is almost never forthcoming and therefore a treacherous promise. When it is forthcoming, it is always a hegemonic, domineering kind of “support.” More often, the support that is forthcoming is to the murderous thugs of Karimov’s sort. Because the duplicitous support for many dictators and senseless instigation of their peoples to claim their freedom from those very dictators defines U.S. foreign policy in Asia, we can see that the slaughter in Andijan is another bitter harvest of Mr. Bush’s fanatical policy.