Advancing democracy in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was one of Bush's few foreign policy successes. Now, with the recent protests against the Georgian government, Joshua Kucera reports that the Bush administration won't admit that things may be starting to sour.
At the end of September, a former defense minister, Irakli Okruashvili, announced that he was forming an opposition party and accused Saakashvili of corruption and conspiring to murder another opposition figure. Two days later Okruashvili was arrested, and two weeks after that was released and mysteriously recanted his allegations against Saakashvili. He has since re-recanted the allegations, and is now in Germany -- either for medical treatment or because he will be arrested if he comes back to Georgia, depending on whom you ask. The entire episode should have been deeply troubling to anyone who cared about democracy, but it didn't seem to bother too many people in Washington."I would call it a bump in the road. You're always going to have, in a healthy democracy, scandals of some sort," one U.S. government official told me before the violence of Nov. 7. "Georgia is a young country without a lot of experience in these matters and they're probably going to make mistakes. They have traditions that aren't the best in the world to fall back on and they may overreact. But I can tell you that no one here is wringing their hands over how Okruashvili was treated. We're paying attention to it, we're watching how things develop, but from our point of view, so far so good."
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
