The FINANCIAL — Georgians have never been particularly keen on Georgian military cooperation in the Middle East, whether it’s with the US, UN, or NATO. As the years pass and the Georgian casualty counter slowly ticks, disapproval has grown steadily as well; four out of five Georgians now want their troops back home.
Georgian Opinion Research Business International has been running regular surveys over the last few years that incorporate questions from a variety of clients (which we cannot share with you), as well as our own curiosities (which we plan to). We’ve been asking questions about a wide variety of political and social attitudes, including opinions on specific political actions such as military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In2005, Misha Saakashvili could do no wrong in the eyes of the Georgian public, and nearly every action taken by the President was applauded by a majority of the country. There was no such roaring majority supportingmilitary involvement overseas, however:only 26% approved of the action and a substantial majority of 60% disapproved. There was a slight increase in respondent approval in 2008, but the change falls within margins of error.
In 2012, however, we saw the beginning of a major downturn in public approval: the number in favor of involvement dropped by 8 points, while disapproval grew by 11. Now in 2013 these numbers have diverged even more: a full 78% disapprove of Georgian military action, and only 16% remain in favor.
Georgians have not only become less approving of involvement in America’s wars, they’ve becomemoresure about it. In 2005, when less than a thousand troops were overseas, an appreciable portion of Georgia wasn’t yet sure what to think (14%), but more and more respondents formed an opinion each successive wave, and last month only 6% declared neutrality or gave no answer.
One or Two Wars? — As you may have figured out from your knowledge of contemporary Georgian history,to get this 8 year trend we combinedresponses from two different questions: the first asks about Georgian troops in Iraq, and the second about Afghanistan.
For our first two waves, Iraq was “the war,” in which there were 850 Georgian soldiers in 2005 and 2,850 in 2008. All the while, negligibly small units were sent only intermittently to Afghanistan. After the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, though,all Georgian troops were withdrawn from Iraq and the governmentinstead escalated involvement in Afghanistan, becoming 1,500 strong by the end of 2012.
We can’t be certain about the comparability of these two questions; when Georgians were fighting in Iraq there hadn’t been a recent invasion of their country, and there have been substantially more casualties in Afghanistan. However, it seems plausible that most Georgians who disapprove of involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan give little significant to which extraneous country hosts Georgian troops; both wars are fought in faraway lands and have little to do with the problems at home.
Assuming there are still Georgians in uniform overseas next year we’ll add one more data point to this trend, and we’ll be able to see if Georgians continue to sour on the topic.
All statistics in this article have margins of error of around 3% with 95% confidence. Visit our website at gorbi.com for more articles.
Discussion about this post