Word: weste
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...that the report would accuse Georgia of firing the first shots. The war all but ended Saakashvili's dreams of unifying Georgia with the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - nearly a fifth of its territory - and the report could possibly damage his other great project: convincing the West that Georgia is a reliable military and economic ally...
...began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first lecture [Putin] ever gave me in Moscow was 'All these Eastern European leaders seem to be so subservient to the U.S.' It was very disgusting to Putin. He warned me, 'Don't even try that...
...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 (55 km) of Tbilisi before turning back. Georgians felt betrayed. As one told me, "We were looking at the skies constantly, asking, Where are the goddam Americans...
...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...
Saakashvili is fond of saying his time in the U.S. taught him about liberty and idealism. For me, he had a more prosaic story, about the time he and his in-laws were chased by hoodlums near his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He has an appreciation not just for America but also for American-style politics, possessing all the tools of a seasoned American pol: consultants, pollsters and genuine enthusiasm for working a crowd...