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Opinion
February 23, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 25
COLCHIS: The Saakashvili we wanted, the Saakashvili we had
Michael Cecire of New America
This is not a column about Mikheil Saakashvili. If we are honest, the onetime Georgian president, former Odesa governor, professional revolution- ary, and lifelong rabble rouser is now so minor a figure in global or regional affairs that he barely merits mention at all. And yet, with every new protest, charged public proclamation, or new twist in Saakashvili’s manic career, we are challenged to assess and scrutinise the brightness of his star in the firmament of Eurasian politics, and it is increasingly dim.
Long the darling of Western boosters, the cult of personality he cultivated was most enthusiastical- ly nurtured—and is arguably still most fastidiously maintained, if diminishing—by an army of fawning politicos, analysts, and functionaries in the US and European capitals. Even as Saakashvili’s support in his home country cratered, Western operatives and analysts continued to uncritically service and “run interference” for him and the authoritarian apparatus he created, while privately (and some- times publicly) parroting his inevitable propa- ganda about the supposed Kremlin origins of the political adversaries that bested him in elections.
Yet, this is not a column about Mikheil Saakash- vili. This is about us. Why do so many Western politicians and key segments of the international commentariat lavish such praise and atten-
tion on someone with such a chequered record? Has there ever been a regional politician of such celebrity with so tenuous, or at least asterisked, a history of success? Ultimately, the story of Saakashvili’s rise and fall is not about coloured revolutions, or Ukraine, or Georgia, or Russia, or
The tale of Saakashvili is an unflattering mirror image of the West’s stuttering and oftentimes self-defeating attempts at regional engagement.
even of Saakashvili himself—but about the stub- born triumph of a flawed brand over reality.
There is no question that Saakashvili’s tenure
in Georgia brought stability and some newfound prosperity to a largely broken country, but only through an unusual confluence of favourable conditions: seemingly unlimited political capital (that he quickly squandered); generous Western political and economic aid; and broad control over the organs of state power. Even then, Saakash- vili’s regime triggered mass protests less than three years following his accession to the presi- dency; stumbled into a disastrous war less than a year later (formalising and cementing the loss of 20% of Georgian territory); and was ejected from power in 2012, despite expansive structural ad- vantages.
And yet, improbably, Saakashvili’s Western
fame persisted. Without presidential immunity, Saakashvili was granted refuge in the United States, where he was granted a golden parachute as a “senior statesman” at Tufts University, which was as generous an opportunity as it was short- lived, with university life apparently ill-suited to Saakashvili’s high-octane ambitions. Decamped to Ukraine, his career newly buoyed by Ukraine’s EuroMaidan and subsequent Russian aggression, Saakashvili eagerly attached himself to the new Ukrainian government and eventually found work as the presidential proconsul in Odesa. That, too, did not last.
As it turns out, reform is hard without a primed political consensus, imperial powers, and major