Saakashvilli

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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/europe/12saakashvili.html

By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: August 11, 2008
GORI, Georgia — All but under the thumb of the Russian Army, this city might seem an unlikely place for a news conference by the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York lawyer who became one of the youngest presidents in the world when he was elected here in 2004 at the age of 36.
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Times Topics: Mikheil Saakashvili
Times Topics: Georgia
But there he was on Monday, stepping out of a black S.U.V. onto a sidewalk strewn with broken glass.
Wearing slacks and a flak jacket looped over his strapping shoulders, he took a few steps toward the backdrop he had in mind — bombed apartment buildings — when a Russian jet flew overhead. It hissed faintly as it moved quickly over the city.
His guards pointed at the sky. They yelled “Air! Air!” and a moment of panic ensued. They shoved the president hard backward toward a wall covered in grape vines, then onto the ground, and held a flak jacket over him.
Some piled on top, to shield him from possible shrapnel. A moment later, he was back in the S.U.V. and speeding down an alleyway here, in a city that he announced on Georgian television had been overrun by the Russian Army — though the Russians, and other Georgian officials, denied it.
For a moment, though, hunkered on the ground, Mr. Saakashvili looked totally vulnerable in what may be a defining image of his presidency.
In this war, which began last Thursday with an artillery exchange between Georgia’s army and separatists in South Ossetia backed by Russia, Russia has wielded all the hard power. Mr. Saakashvili has fought back with soft power: the polished international image, the fluent English, repeated, eloquent appeals on cable news for Western support and, frequently, near histrionic claims about Russian intentions and actions in the conflict.
Educated at Columbia Law School in the mid-1990s, Mr. Saakashvili has carefully cultivated Western reporters and is well known in Washington, where he is close to conservative politicians. When Senator John McCain visited Georgia in 2006, the president took him out on the Black Sea.
Mr. Saakashvili belongs to a generation of young men and women from the former Soviet Union who were educated in the West but returned to their home countries. He proudly professes to hold “American values.”
His personal, fierce allegiance to the United States, where he became a successful lawyer, has helped make Georgia, a onetime backwater, into a pivotal country in the politics of the post-Soviet era.
Mr. Saakashvili was also a strong supporter of the American-led war in Iraq, contributing the second largest contingent of troops this year after only Britain, before the soldiers returned to Georgia this week to join the fighting.
The Bush administration, with its broad assurances of support for Georgia, has come in for strong criticism in Georgia for having emboldened Mr. Saakashvili to challenge Russia.
But Mr. Saakashvili has resisted the notion that he was somehow taken in. Asked in a recent interview on CNN if he believed Georgia could win against Russia militarily, Mr. Saakashvili said, “I am not crazy.”
But many here say he is headstrong and reckless, endangering the country’s security by rashly ordering an attack on the Russian enclave of South Ossetia on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and badly underestimating Russia’s determination to respond militarily. The critics say he has shown he is willing to put his ambition ahead of the best interests of his people.
Bold gambles and dramatic gestures have always been part of Mr. Saakashvili’s political arsenal, however, and no small amount of his appeal. So, too, has been his inclination to torment his increasingly powerful neighbor.
When he won the Georgian presidency in 2003, he did so by pushing aside Eduard A. Shevardnadze, a former Soviet apparatchik, following street protests known as the Rose Revolution. It was the first of a series of pro-Western movements that spread to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and alarmed the Kremlin.
He then infuriated Moscow by running for re-election on a platform of absorbing the breakaway areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He managed to win back two smaller enclaves, and then set his sights on the bigger prize of South Ossetia.
On the occasions when the Kremlin appeared to strike back — shutting off gas supplies in the dead of winter, sending drones and fighter planes into Georgian air space, for example — he complained loudly, taking his case to the international news media.
At home in Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili’s bold touch was never far away, either.
He set out to eradicate corruption in the traffic police by firing all the traffic policemen. Those who wanted to rejoin had to reapply. Here, in a small way, he won.
He also purged the civil service and universities of older, Soviet-trained workers. His administration is perhaps the youngest anywhere, a cadre of 30somethings, many of whom, like the president, are Western-educated.
Not surprisingly, many cashiered civil servants were among the protesters last fall who took to the streets of Tbilisi in a large, sustained demonstration. Mr. Saakashvili, saying the protesters were inspired by a Russian-linked politician bent on staging a coup, responded by disbanding the marchers with riot police.
Now, Mr. Saakashvili calls the war a struggle not between Georgia and Russia, but between Russia and expanding Western influence in the states of the former Soviet Union.
Asked his views of Russia’s motives in the war in an interview on Saturday, he said: “They want to get rid of any democratic movement in this part of their neighborhood. That’s it. Period.”