Ace, they're not gonna fight. It's the last thing they want. Russia's really tried to avoid taking a side in this one, but they are more than willing to fight rhetorically using CIS monitors to counter OSCE ones.

I hate to plug myself in people's comments, but we've got a metric buttload of informed comment from myself and others who have lived, are living, or are native to ex-Soviet Turkestan at Registan.net. Some people are normal geeks, you know, for things like D&D, Star Trek, LotR, etc. We're Central Asia geeks.

Weird thing with the Tulip name is that it may be one of those media fabrications. I first heard it way back. Sometime after Georgia's Rose Revolution but before the Orange Revolution. Some of the regional analysts were grasping for names for potential Kyrgyz or Kazakh revolutions and that's what they came up with. Others include "Lemon/Yellow Revolution," "Yurt Revolution," and "Pink Revolution" (the Jalalabad protesters wore pink at first). The plethora of names kind of points to just how disorganized the opposition is and how much of an elite struggle this is (the opposition leaders are former government ministers).

Forgot to mention, Russia has a treaty obligation to defend Kyrgyzstan. If they do move in, their motivation would most likely be to keep the peace rather than to prop up Akayev (though keeping the peace and propping him up might be the same thing).

Tulip, Rose, Orange, and Cedar Revolutions... sounds like a perfume.

... the sweet perfume of freedom!

It sounds like the revolutionaries in Kyrgyzstan are Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who are not good guys, unlike other agitators for democracy in other Islamic thuggocracies. They are like a more violent Muslim Brotherhood organized into secret Communist cells, with a secret leadership and a communist/totalitarian islamist universalist worldview. In Central Asia they are mostly Uzbeks, and some people think their headquarters are in London England (I'm not kidding). But the identity of their current leadership is completely secret. So who can tell? Anyway, if Hizb ut-Tahrir overthrows Kyrgyzstan's government the result will be more like the rise of the Taliban than what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Sorry dude, they're not HT. And even if they were, they wouldn't meet with much success. Kyrgyzstan is hardly a religious place. Even those who practice Islam are borderline animists at times.