by CKR
While we were going through the charade of ramping up to an already-decided invasion of Iraq in 2003, my two biggest concerns were that once war is started, it takes on its own logic and may not be possible to control, and that, in an unstable part of the world, it could easily spread.
One of the imponderables is what can happen in nearby states. This morning, Turkmenistan has lost its head of state, and no obvious successors are in sight. Saparmurat Niyazov renamed the months in his family's honor and constructed a rotating gold statue of himself in central Ashgabat with the sun always shining on his face. He had been a leader of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic and continued after the fall of the Soviet Union. He encouraged the study of his volume of poems in the schools, but not much else.
Turkmenistan supplies natural gas to Europe and was a source to Ukraine last winter, when Ukraine's dispute with Russia resulted in decreases in gas from Russia. It is located (click on map to enlarge; from Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection) north of Iran (next candidate for the forcible march of democracy) and Afghanistan (rapidly falling apart again), south of Uzbekistan (another dictatorship) and Kazakhstan (headed that way). It has a radioactive tailings pile on the shore of the rising Caspian Sea from bromine mining. It is mostly desert, with a population of a little over five million.
Some of the news stories say that it is a Moslem nation, but if it is like Kazakhstan, its Soviet past kept religious feeling low, and we may take "Moslem" in the same way we may say France is Christian.
Niyazov continued the old Soviet tradition of not letting possible successors get too close. He supported the US "war on terror", so the US will feel that it has an interest. Russia will also feel it has an interest in a former Soviet republic, but neither has a boundary with Turkmenistan. The hotbed of Taliban activity in Afghanistan has been in the south, but there are rumblings of instability in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Not a good thing to happen just now, but you can't plan everything.