Thanks for Foreign Policy Watch, here are two clips of Imedi, the opposition TV station Sakaashvili claimed was calling for the violent overthrow of his regime, being shut down—live.
This serves as good context for some actually good reporting by Michael Weiss in the Weekly Standard (pace Ann Marlowe) about the crisis earlier this month… if you can ignore the petty comparisons to Pakistan.
Here is a fine example of how the United States and Europe can still resort to an effective carrot-and-stick diplomacy with iniquitous partners who still place high premiums on their military and economic ties to the West. The rumors of the Bush Doctrine’s death have been greatly exaggerated. It helps to compare Georgia not to Pakistan but to another often refractory and complicated ally: Turkey.
Weiss goes on to make a not-apt-at-all comparison to the PKK troubles along the Iraq/Turkey border, the challenges of the various mutual defense clauses in the NATO treaty, and the ways in which the EU is dangling the potential of membership in front of Ankara. Turkey’s many human rights issues, Kurdish problem, and the very real issue of Cyprus have no analogy to Georgia’s two breakaway provinces (in particular the involvement of Russia as a spoiler agent), nor does Turkey’s successful election and halting steps toward liberalization have any analog in the recent brutal crackdown in Tblisi.
So it’s close, but no cigar. And we still don’t know if or how Imedi will ever be reopened. With friends like these…
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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