Despite his bloodthirsty rhetoric directed at Georgia’s two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Saakashvili enjoys bipartisan support in Washington. Even at the height of a bitter domestic election campaign, the supporters of both U.S. President George W. Bush and challenger John Kerry have nothing but praise for the Columbia Law School alumnus. George Soros may have pledged millions to oust Bush, but he has boasted that his money helped to install Saakashvili in power last November. The Open Society Institute helped train the protesters who toppled Eduard Shevardnadze to the applause of the Bush White House. ~ Mark Almond, US Blinded by Love for Saakashvili

The career and attitudes of Mr. Saakashvili illuminate a great deal about the sort of “democracy” that American liberals and neoconservatives want to extend to the four corners of the earth, as well as demonstrating why the unfortunate people of Georgia are doomed in the short term to bad government and the tyranny of managerial elites and the “international community.”

There is an almost Orwellian aspect to the way in which the U.S. establishment has erased its love affair with Shevardnadze from the pages of history while it carries on in exactly the same fashion with his successor. After all, then-Secretary of State James Baker went to Georgia in 1992 to praise Shevardnadze’s anti-corruption drive and democratization efforts, even finding time for a photo-op with the notorious mafioso Dzhaba Ioseliani.

In 1999, James Baker presided over the ceremony awarding Shevardnadze the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Then in 2003 the same James Baker returned to Georgia and blasted the Shevardnadze regime for corruption and election fraud.

This rapid change from American officials’ defending the corrupt and abusive Eduard Shevardnadze to seeking his ouster at first perplexed me when I read about it, since the neoconservative rag Wall Street Journal and neoconservative favourite John McCain have gone out of their way in the past to defend Shevardnadze against the purportedly sinister designs of the Russian government. At first, I made the mistake of believing that the movement to oust Shevardnadze was a genuine, popular movement, and assumed that the neoconservatives had lost an ally through his sheer corruption. The coup that brought the weird neo-Stalinist and Shevardnadze protege Saakashvili to power was supposed to remove the overt taint of rigged elections and effective dictatorship from the U.S. puppet in Tbilisi. Now the dictator of Georgia, who wants to be “like Stalin and Beria,” according to his wife, has the moniker of democrat. Such a “democracy” is interested only in empowering vassals loyal to Washington and the globalist agenda now being exported from there.

Now, however, Saakashvili promises to reignite the simmering separatist wars that have wracked Georgia since independence. This cannot be in the best interests of the Georgian people, whose country has already been ruined by the ongoing fighting both at home and in nearby Chechnya. It must be to serve the interests of his masters in Washington that Saakashvili is resuming the threats against the Russian-backed separatists in the same, tired struggle for influence in the Caucasus that has nothing to do with real American interests and everything to do with neoconservative Russophobia and hegemonism.

Filed under: politics