Max Seddon has written an interesting summary of Mikheil Saakashvili’s tenure as president of Georgia. However, this part is a little misleading:

“Saakashvili became very convenient because of the freedom agenda,” Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a National Intelligence Council officer from 2006 to 2009, said. The White House was keen to find a positive story in the increasingly dim light of Iraq and Afghanistan; so-called “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan quickly proved far less rosy than Georgia’s. “One of the reasons Georgia was chosen as the poster child was the other color revolutions went bad — they had nowhere else to go to.”

This mixes up the chronology a bit, and credits the Bush administration with recognition of failures that it didn’t have yet. It’s true that the other “color” revolutions “went bad,” and they did so from the start, but it’s important to remember that this wasn’t widely acknowledged at the time and the Bush administration was the very last to recognize what had happened. Saakashvili’s rule always suffered from the flaws that plagued Georgia later on, but these were not as obvious to many Westerners in 2004 or 2005 as they became in the years to follow. Georgia was “chosen” for this role as an exemplar of the “freedom agenda” because Saakashvili had better contacts and more advocates in the West, he was more enthusiastic about realigning his country with Washington than his “color” revolution counterparts, and he delivered tangible support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember that Bush was still prattling on about the “freedom agenda” for at least two years after he was re-elected, and he delivered his delusional Second Inaugural just a few months before his visit to Tbilisi. His speech in Tbilisi picked up the themes of the address, and sowed the seeds for many years of misunderstanding of how far the U.S. would go in support of Georgian actions. For most of those two years, Bush also seemed to think that the war in Iraq was not going that badly. So the administration didn’t “choose” Georgia after they realized there was nothing left of the “freedom agenda” anywhere else. They embraced Saakashvili right away, and then they and many others in the West remained willfully blind to his mistakes and flaws for the next five years.

Seddon’s article is mostly accurate in what it says, but unfortunately it understates or omits abuses of power under Saakashvili. For instance, there is no mention of the brutal crackdown on opposition protesters in November 2007. That was the moment when Saakashvili’s heavy-handed treatment of dissidents started to be noticed by a lot more people in the West, and it was the occasion for many long-delayed criticisms of the authoritarian streak in his government. Likewise, there is no mention of the frequent practice of labeling dissidents and journalists as Russian spies. Some of the serious abuses under Saakashvili were already quite evident in 2007, but for the next five years Saakashvili continued to have an undeserved cheering section in the Western media that reliably accepted whatever he and his American allies said about his political opponents and critics. Because Seddon’s article makes a point of calling recent actions against former government officials a “crackdown,” it is important to recognize how little attention the article pays to the abuses of power by many of the same officials that are now under investigation.