BBC News: Shevardnadze says US betrayed him

[T Roosevelt]

Hmmmm, isn't THIS interesting? And who was it that recently made a trip to Georgia? James Baker? Coincidence?


Ousted Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze has accused the US of helping to remove him from power.

Mr Shevardnadze said he could not understand why he had been abandoned after giving Washington full support in foreign policy, including on Iraq.

His comments came as President George W Bush telephoned acting president Nino Burjanadze to say he was sending a delegation "to assess Georgia's needs".

He said he wanted to help her democratic and free-market reforms.

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[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Baker was involved with this?

My gosh. He's the shadow part of the shadow government. I wonder when he'll become as ineffective as Kissinger as a spokesman for the administration?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. If Shevardnadze is telling the truth

then this would actually be an instance of Bush doing the right thing - siding with democracy.

Maybe Shevardnadze's miscalculation was that he thought he was more valuable for the oil pipeline - but:

"Ms Burzhanadze's interim government yesterday received backing from the US secretary of state Colin Powell who rang to "to offer support", according to a US statement.

Ms Burzhanadze's first acts in the job yesterday were to contact BP and the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's envoy to Georgia. Aides said this demonstrated the country's respect for the international community and the pipeline's role in its economic future."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/georgia/story/0,14065,1092427,00.html

[Cocoa]

3. my guess...

Bush/Baker helped Shev. steal the election, not counting on the opposition taking it back. The U.S. only switched to supporting the opposition after it judged the situation was hopeless.

Further speculation... if our military wasn't stretched as thin as it is, it may have turned out differently, Georgia may have been a front in the war on terror.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. "When word gets out in the street"

The way the local boys do it, they play their devious behind-the-scenes deals up to the time that the word gets out in the street. They are lawyers and highly elected officials, afterall, and have much to lose if the investigations begin. So once they lose their cover, they cut bait and run.

[Cocoa]

6. they blew it on Venezuela

NYT too. Both the administration and the NYT jumped the gun way too early on that one.

[SadEagle]

4. I doubt he sided with democracy.

Chances are, the decision was made for 'stability' reasons --- this is strategic oil-pipeline region, after all. Chances are, once it was clear that the opposition was winning, they decided that supporting Shevardnadze for longer would only increase chances of instability or civil war..

[Zhade]

7. Check out this article.

http://www.exile.ru/178/178010101.html

Excerpt:

In order to untangle the web that connects Georgia’s election crisis to global politics, keep in mind four things: James Baker III, Ambassador Richard Miles, Caspian Sea oil, and Russia.

When James Baker was sent out to Georgia this past July to lecture its President, Eduard Shevardnadze, about the need to ensure that the upcoming parliamentary elections were "free and fair," it must have raised a lot of eyebrows. Eyebrows of the "you’ve got to be shitting me" variety.

James Baker? This is the same guy who Bush Jr. hired in 2000 to steal the Florida vote, handing the U.S. presidency over to a tool who lost by half a million votes. The way Baker railroaded Bush into the presidency has done more damage to American democracy than anything since Nixon and Watergate. Sending him into corrupt Georgia to demand that they have "free and fair elections" is like sending Yegor Gaidar into Iraq in order to advise them on privatization and the transition to a market economy – which Bush also did.

So what the hell was Jim Baker doing in Georgia playing the role of some Jimmy Carter bleeding heart? After all, Bush didn’t send him to Azerbaijan, which became the former Soviet Union’s first official dynasty after its pro-U.S. leader handed power to his son in a rigged election. Nor have we raised much of a fuss about free and fair elections to our other new friends in the region. Fuss? Tchya, right. Uzbek strongman Karimov must have received about 100,000 dollars in aid for every American soldier he allowed to be based in his police state (assuming we have about 5,000 soldiers there). Or you could say that we gave about $1,000,000 in aid to Karimov for every political opponent he’s got rotting in jail, boiled skin melted onto busted bones. And Kyrgyzstan – which just started getting its big Santa packages from Uncle Sam after it gave us an air base - has actually slid backwards into deeper authoritarianism ever since Bush started stuffing its leaders’ pockets.