Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a U.S.-trained attorney regarded by Washington as a pro-democracy wunderkind, has made a political career of brinkmanship with neighboring Russia. This time, he may have overplayed his hand.
Saakashvili helped oust former Soviet Foreign Minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003 and became Europe's youngest president the following January at the age of 36. He has been jousting with Moscow ever since over control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two pro-Russian regions of his country.
A lover of Georgian wine and Western culture, Saakashvili is described as supremely confident and even autocratic. He moved troops into disputed South Ossetia last week as a new Russian president presided in Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Bush visited Beijing, and much of the world's attention was focused on the Summer Olympics. Georgian forces came under overwhelming air and ground attack and were quickly repelled.
Saakashvili says his forces were provoked into action in South Ossetia; Russia accuses him of launching an offensive move against his nemesis. Either way, he has ended up in a more precarious position.
"It was a calculated gamble and he miscalculated," said F. Stephen Larrabee, corporate chair in European Security at the Rand Corp. in Washington. "He has been forced to withdraw. It's a military blunder. It caused an international incident."
While Georgians are likely to rally behind Saakashvili as long as they feel under threat from Russia, in the long run he may face a backlash for launching military action that failed and may make it impossible to bring a breakaway region back into the fold.
The move may also have jeopardized Saakashvili's larger goal for Georgia to join NATO, observers said. They said Saakashvili's pursuit of NATO membership has been making the Russian government nervous and more aggressive, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is unlikely to want a new risk-taker in the family.
Saakashvili has been the Bush administration's poster child for pro-Western movements. He keeps an autographed photograph of himself with Bush in his office and is one of the closest U.S. allies in the region. The United States supplied him with military aid to build his army and he, in turn, sent Georgian troops to Iraq to support the U.S. mission there.
