Matt Yglesias

Saakashvili the Pure

Amidst an overall useful column, former Bush administration official Paul Saunders makes the important point that Mikhail Saakashvili’s government in Tbilisi is not, in fact, as pure as the driven snow:

But the situation inside Georgia belies Saakashvili’s rhetorical commitment to freedom. Most glaring was his handling of opposition protests last fall. The State Department’s 2007 Human Rights Report, released just a few months ago, found “serious problems” with Georgia’s human rights record and notes “excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations”; “impunity of police officers”; and declining respect for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and political participation. Ana Dolidze, a democracy advocate and former chair of Georgia’s Young Lawyers Association, has described in detail how Saakashvili acted quickly after entering office to empower the executive branch at the expense of parliament and to strengthen the government by “stifling political expression, pressuring influential media and targeting vocal critics and opposition leaders” — including by using law enforcement agencies. Saakashvili is far from the morally pure democrat he would have the West believe he is.

By the same token, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia certainly falls short of norms of liberal democracy in a variety of ways, it’s hardly the greatest totalitarian dystopia known to man. Like the gambit to posit a gaping cultural void between “western” Georgia and “eastern” Russia the effort to impute a large ideological element of democracy versus dictatorship into the Russia-Georgia conflict is essentially bogus. Georgia by all accounts comes closer to the democratic ideal than does Russia, but both countries exist along the continuum flawed political systems. Georgia’s not a place like, say, Poland or the Czech Republic that’s really organized a clear post-Communist democratic politics. Russia and Georgia are fighting over land and influence, not big ideas, and as Saunders says “fighting erupted not primarily because of what the country represents but because of its government’s actions.”

What Was McCain’s Advice to Saakashvili?

Mark Kleiman wonders: “If McCain has really been talking to Saakashvili “daily,” what advice has McCain been giving him? Did he reinforce the urgent advice of the State Department and the White House that Saakashvili avoid allowing himself to be provoked into giving the Russians a pretext for invasion, or was McCain encouraging the imprudence that handed Putin the victory we and the Georgians are now trying to recover from?”

McCain should answer this question directly, but his record strongly suggests the possibility that he was encouraging imprudence. And why shouldn’t he? Most pundits seem to think that foreign crises provoked by bad conservative policies are politically beneficial to conservative politicians and, certainly, the McCain campaign sees things that way and is trying to milk the crisis for all it’s worth politically. Under the circumstances, doing what he can to promote international instability seems canny.