Word: border
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With much to prove, Saakashvili gave an unusually robust Show during my visit. It started with a ride along the Black Sea coast on his presidential helicopter, and by the time it was finished almost a week later, it had led from the Abkhazian border in the northwest to the central wine country of Kakheti and eventually to the President's offices inside the new glass-and-steel chancellery building in Tbilisi...
...took us to a deserted stretch of Black Sea coast at Anaklia Bay. Saakashvili, who is sometimes swept away by his own optimism, met several leading Spanish architects on the beach to discuss developing a resort nearly 4 miles (6 km) long that would lead right up to the border with the breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The area may have natural potential - "The water's like boiled milk," an official told me approvingly - but Saakashvili seemed to be ignoring the obvious. If war breaks out again, the Russian army will rumble first through Anaklia, bombing and burning, just...
Saakashvili's heavily armed SUV convoy then took us north over dusty roads to the border village of Ganmukhuri and the 8-ft. (2.5 m) earthen berm he likes to call "the next Berlin Wall." Throngs of jubilant Georgians waved flags, passed him handwritten notes, yelled "Misha" and led chants of "Gaumarjos!" (To victory!). Saakashvili's personal film crew, which follows him nearly everywhere he goes, climbed the berm looking for a better shot but was quickly pulled down. This is, after all, a tense place, where a shouting match two years ago between Saakashvili and a Russian general almost...
After years of escalating border incidents, war began in earnest the night of Aug. 7, 2008, when Saakashvili, who says he believed a Russian attack was imminent, ordered the shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. It was a colossal miscalculation. Saakashvili told me he never expected the U.S., Georgia's closest ally, to fight for Georgia. Yet the country was nonetheless gripped by a sense of abandonment when the inevitable punishing Russian counterattack came. The Russians bombed infrastructure targets all over Georgia and cut off the main east-west highway, then marched to within 34 miles...
...strength of Georgia's democracy is not a small thing; it is the only thing. If a pro-Western liberal democracy can thrive on Russia's southern border, other struggling former Soviet republics might follow suit. And since the Caucasus region is a key route for getting Central Asian oil and gas to Western markets without going through Russia, Georgia could help lessen the West's dependence on Russian energy. But first Georgia needs to become stable, peaceful and prosperous. History will judge Saakashvili, and all his enthusiasms, on whether or not he can make that happen...