Word: saakashvili
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stay calm." But the military is rebuilding. An infantry battalion will deploy to Afghanistan in January under the command of U.S. Marines, and it will return, as veterans did from a deployment in Iraq, with more experience and confidence for the next engagement. Though the E.U. report found that Saakashvili was unjustified in firing first, he says the Russians left him without options. "I've been running it over and over again, what happened," he said. "But we had no choice." (See pictures of the war in Georgia...
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...
...rapprochement between warring parties seems unlikely. In a brief telephone interview, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity called Saakashvili "psychologically unbalanced," "unstable" and a "liar." For his part, Saakashvili seems to like to taunt Putin, now Prime Minister of Russia. ("Putin pledged solemnly to hang me by the balls. He couldn't succeed in that," he says.) The Russians refuse to speak to Saakashvili at all. They continue to accuse him of genocide, a dubious description for a conflict that resulted in 358 South Ossetian deaths...
...relationship with the U.S., meanwhile, is in transition. Though viewed with suspicion by some for his association with George W. Bush's democratic evangelism - "In some ways, he's the last neocon standing," says Lincoln Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University - Saakashvili remains close to Biden, who visited Georgia in August. A senior Obama Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that in private talks, Biden "spoke very candidly about the importance of acting on his promise to pursue political reforms." Saakashvili said he likes the new Administration. "I saw mostly second-term Bush," Saakashvili laments: the Bush...
...Next Dubai" Saakashvili, 41, is the son of intellectuals, his father a doctor, his mother a professor. In 1993 he got his first prolonged taste of the U.S. when he won a fellowship to study law at Columbia. He lived in New York City and Washington for several years, passed the New York bar exam and worked in private practice before being summoned back to Georgia to be part of a movement of young reformers, many of whom had been living in the West, that would transform what had been until 1991 a republic of the Soviet Union...