IS THE WEST LOSING AZERBAIJAN? Of course, there’s some question whether it was ever ours to lose. Here’s an email that former InstaPundit Paris correspondent Claire Berlinski (now in Turkey) sent in response to my last Azerbaijan post. When I got it, I thought it was not-for-publication, and by the time I found out otherwise it was old news. But maybe it’s relevant now:

Actually, my fiancé David Gross is in Azerbaijan right now taking photos for Zuma. He says the protests today were anything but massive. The opposition is apparently nominal, as well as “unprofessional, unthinking, and unattractive.” (You can take the last adjective with a grain of salt, I suppose; he was after all writing to me.) He spent the day yesterday with the ADP, who seemed to him unprepared for the protests. He accompanied them to a neighborhood where fraud had been alleged, but no one wanted their leaflets. (“They’re liars like the rest of them,” said one of the women he spoke to.) “They [the ADP] are like a small business,” he wrote to me last night, “with employees, a boss, and a product, and while they’re not the best on the market, they’re a little spicier and cheaper than the others … if they were ever a serious opposition, they were crushed before the elections.” They were hoping for 50,000 at the rally today; David thought there were 5,000 to 10,000 at most (“really, rather dull”). After the rally, he sent me this rather deflated SMS: “The opposition is a farce. This country is stable.”

That’s no reason to give up on freedom there, but it sounds as if an Orange Revolution isn’t in the cards any time soon.

UPDATE: Nathan Hamm emails:

To add to the email you posted this morning, the weakness of the opposition should also give some food for thought to those who are very upset that the US (and Europe when people bother to pay attention to what they’re doing) isn’t making a bigger stink of things.

I don’t think the situation has been particularly well-played on the part of the US, but we cannot will a healthy opposition and democratic revolution into existence (Guardian column writers and Kremlin officials might tell you otherwise…). And while we can let them know we think they got a raw deal in the vote, that we deplore violence used against protesters, and that we support their goals, is it worth putting all our chips behind them if their support is shallow? (Or if they can’t keep up the protests? They cancelled this weekend’s: Link.)

I think the answers are fairly straightforward, but people often get caught up in the excitement of “a new democratic revolution!” without paying enough attention to what opinion is in the country.

Watch for something similar after Kazakhstan’s presidential vote in the next few days. It’s even clearer there that the opposition’s support is extremely shallow, and often looks to be made up of opportunistic former officials. In the past, they’ve been extremely savvy at playing Western media and NGOs to make them seem more relevant to Kazakh politics than they really are.

As I say, not a reason to give up, but we need to be realistic in our expectations. Remember, democratization is a process, not an event.