Mikheil Saakashvili is finished - Russian military triumph leaves pro-West Georgia uncertain - by Fred Weir
There is an air of satisfaction in Moscow over what appears to be a crushing Russian victory in its muscular, five-day long intervention to preserve the quasi-independence of South Ossetia and weaken Georgia's West-leaning President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose drive to take his tiny country into NATO has deeply alarmed the Kremlin. Few Russians appeared in any mood to criticize their government for what seemed an efficient operation that brought big geopolitical rewards. "If Russia had hesitated, that might have been taken as weakness of the new president," says Sergei Mikayev, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank. "It seems like Russia took a decision that may not have been completely irreproachable, but it looks like there was no alternative."
Mr. Saakashvili, who appears to have miscalculated Russia's response to the Georgian offensive, may pay a political price. In the 2003 "Rose Revolution," Georgians embraced Saakashvili, a US-educated lawyer who pledged to reunite the fractured country of 5 million and lead it into the NATO alliance. "What we see is a total collapse of Georgia, and the responsibility is all Saakashvili's," says Kakha Kukava, an opposition parliamentarian. "It was his personal decision to use force and the results were disastrous." Some people in the street echoed those sentiments. "[Saakashvili] is finished," says Nestan Nijaradze, a freelance writer in Tbilisi.
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