The former Soviet Republic of Georgia held parliamentary elections this week at which the US puppet President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party apparently did not gain enough seats to retain a majority in parliament. Billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili’s disparate coalition will — for now — control parliament barring some last-minute maneuvering by Saakashvili. Ivanishvili spread millions around dozens of K Street lobbying firms in apparently successful efforts to convince Washington that he would be just as loyal to Washington as the tie-munching, war-with-Russia-starting, wild-eyed Saakashvili.
Many commentators would like to point to Saakashvili’s defeat as a black eye for US interventionist foreign policy — a backlash. Those same commentators likely made the same noises when US favorite Shevardnadze was ousted by Saakashvili.
Myth:
“Despite his loathing for Georgia’s president, however, Ivanishvili’s policies seem rather similar. On foreign policy, he says this: ‘Our policy is European and Euro-atlantic integration. There is no substitute for Nato.'”
It is the dialectics of the West in the post-1989 era, as Martin Sieff points out in this excellent recent article on the lessons of Benghazi:
“This policy of spreading democracy at accelerated speed across Middle East societies has, therefore, become bipartisan policy orthodoxy in Washington. Politicians and pundits on both the conservative-Republican and liberal-Democrat sides of the ideological divide enthusiastically, repeatedly and indeed mindlessly continue to express it on every possible occasion.
“Ironically, this policy puts the US on the ‘left’ or revolutionary side of the global political spectrum, using the terms and definitions that have been universally employed for more than 220 years since the French Revolution. As the superpower promoting continued revolution in the name of democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, the US has become the power promoting revolutionary change and destabilization of governments in the name of its own ideological values and standards around the world.”
Interested readers might want to check out Prof. Mark Almond and Christine Stone’s excellent Post-Communist Georgia: A Short History.
6:28 pm on October 2, 2012
