At any moment, analysts say, Georgia might have staved off a military attack by heeding Moscow's warnings and renouncing or at least qualifying its desire to join NATO.
Instead, Saakashvili reportedly made jokes about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's height.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 19, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 42 words Type of Material: Correction
Georgia's military: An article in Sunday's Section A about the run-up to the war in the Caucasus said Georgia's military budget was tripled to $3.2 billion. The budget has tripled in the last three years to $1 billion for fiscal year 2008.
--
Delicate balance
Eduard Shevardnadze, too, was disliked by Putin's team. The Georgian president who preceded Saakashvili was the man who, as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, oversaw the end of the Soviet Union and the dismemberment of its empire -- an event that Putin described as the greatest disaster of the 20th century.
But the diplomat managed to balance Georgia's pro-Western tilt with enough deference to Moscow to keep it mostly off the Kremlin's radar.
"Shevardnadze was very careful," said Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. "He balanced everything."
Not so Saakashvili. Propelled to power in 2004 in the so-called Rose Revolution, he immediately began to push his country headlong toward the West, purging the Soviet-era bureaucracy, deregulating the economy and cozying up to Washington by sending 2,000 troops to Iraq. In the spring of 2005, he and thousands of Georgians proudly cheered on President Bush when he visited Tbilisi and said the United States would support their progress toward Western-style democracy.
"Everyone was expecting that something would happen because of Saakashvili's Western ways," said one European diplomat here in the Georgian capital, who like others contacted for this report spoke on condition of anonymity.
Analysts noted a stepping up of an anti-Georgian propaganda campaign in the Russian media about three years ago. In the weeks before the war, Russian media publicized opinion polls depicting tiny Georgia as Russia's worst enemy.
Tensions increased in 2005 after Georgia expelled two Russian diplomats it accused of espionage. Russia deported Georgians living in Moscow, sending them back to Tbilisi in cargo planes.
In the middle of the winter of 2006, South Ossetian separatists who have been agitating against Georgia for nearly two decades allegedly blew up the gas pipeline to Georgia, leaving the country without electricity or heat for two weeks.
