http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/world/europe/07georgia.html

News Media Feel Limits to Georgia’s Democracy
[…]
Georgia and its American backers, including the Republican and Democratic United States presidential contenders, have presented Georgia as a plucky little democracy in an unstable region, a country deserving of generous aid and NATO membership. But a growing number of critics inside and outside the country argue that it falls well short of Western democratic standards and cite a lack of press freedom as a glaring example.

Mr. Saakashvili, a telegenic New York-trained lawyer, came to power in 2004 after a wave of protests known as the Rose Revolution, promising to shed the authoritarianism of the past. But Lincoln A. Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University, contended that Mr. Saakashvili now presided over a “semiauthoritarian” state, while saying that it was the most democratic of the former Soviet states in the region.

“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” he said. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”
[…]

In the Obama-McCain debates, McCain lambasted Obama for initially saying that both sides should have displayed restraint, calling him “naive.” Both Obama and McCain now, however, are calling Russia a “clear aggressor” and supporting Georgia and Ukraine for NATO. Obama, however did say that there were provocative signs earlier in the year (he said starting April, I think) and that urgent diplomacy should have been undertaken to avoid it, and also that the Russian peacekeepers in Abkhazia and S. Ossetia should have been replaced with international ones.

A delegation from Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) is blaming both Russia and Georgia for an armed conflict in August. PACE officials are also calling for an international probe into the causes of the brief war.

The leader of the PACE delegation, Luc Van den Brande of Belgium, said during a September 25 news conference that both Moscow and Tbilisi did not do enough to prevent an armed conflict during the weeks leading up to the actual outbreak of fighting in early August. […].

“This conflict didn’t start on August 7,” he pointed out. Among the confrontational incidents that occurred during the run-up to the fighting was a Russian shoot-down of an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance plane. […]

http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav092608b.shtml

Biden pledges support for Georgia

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden while visiting Milwaukee today pledged United States support for Georgia, the former Soviet republic, against any Russian aggression.

“We will not let the intentions of the Russian government to bring down the democratically elected government” in Georgia, Biden said during a meeting in Milwaukee with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili at the Pfister Hotel.

Biden also said the U.S. should make “a considerable commitment in the economic well-being and stability in Georgia,” according to remarks provided by a pool report. Biden met with Saakashvili for about two hours this morning, mostly in private. Several photographers and a CBS News reporter were allowed into the meeting for about five minutes.

Biden also told the Georgian president today that “it’s important that Russians pay a price for what they’ve done.” He was referring to the August invasion by Russian troops into two regions of Georgia. Biden visited Georgia last month in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Phil Walzak, the campaign spokesman for Barack Obama in Wisconsin, said Saakashvili made the trek to Milwaukee because it turned out to be a mutually convenient time for the meeting. Walzak noted the two have known each other for years.

The meeting came just two days after Saakashvili met in New York at the United Nations with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The timing likely suggests that the Democratic ticket wanted the meeting to underscore Biden’s lengthier foreign policy resume, said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist.

“Presidents of foreign countries just don’t fly around other countries chasing senators. They see them in Washington,” Franklin said.

The relatively low-key manner in which the meeting was held - limited press coverage - was also likely done deliberately so it wouldn’t get in the way of the larger political stories of the day, Franklin said.

For Saakashvili, meeting with Biden amounted to “balancing the partisan scales,” or hedging his bets on the presidential race, Franklin said.
—-
Here’s a mention of Saakashvili meeting with Palin, though apparently he refrained from calling her “gorgeous”, unlike the Pakistani president…

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/alex_spillius/blog/2008/09/25/president_of_pakistan_calls_sarah_palin_gorgeous
[…]
A pool report from CNN shows that during the “grip and grin” photo op between Sarah Palin and Asif Ali Zardari at the UN, the president of Pakistan could not conceal his admiration for the Republican VP nominee. Mr Zardari, who was widowed but nine months ago, called her “gorgeous” and made it clear he was happy to carry on gripping for some time.
[…]
Mrs Palin has been taking her gorgeousness around New York all week, meeting dignitaries including Hamid Karzai, Henry Kissinger and Mikheil Saakashvili as the McCain campaign has attempted to demonstrate she is capable of acting on the world stage.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080926/ap_on_el_pr/biden

Biden meets with Georgian president without press

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden met with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on Friday but didn’t let reporters in as the pair posed for photographers at the beginning of the session.
[…]
Phil Walzak, a spokesman for Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, said, “It’s a private meeting between the senator and a head of state.” He said Biden and Saakshvili would likely issue a statement after the meeting but won’t take questions from reporters.

Walzak said he did not know why Saakashvili was in Milwaukee or the nature of the discussion with Biden, who was campaigning in Wisconsin.
[…]

Georgians trust in God: in Saakashvili, not so much

By Adrian Blomfield, 13/08/2008

The Georgian people are fabled for their generosity and charm - sometimes to ridiculous extremes. As a heavy Russian artillery assault pounded one village near the Ossetian border, an old Georgian woman crept alongside a garden wall where I was taking shelter to offer me apples from her orchard.

Yet many Georgians have a tendency towards recklessness - as anyone who has driven on their roads can confirm.

The international consensus is that Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, took the national trait of recklessness to a farcical level when he decided to launch an offensive to liberate the region of South Ossetia from separatist rebel control.

Around the world and even in Georgia itself, where the mood has swiftly changed from gung-ho optimism to glumness and introspection, many wonder how the president could have made such a monumental blunder.

[…]

As Georgians begin to analyse what went wrong, Saakashvili’s future appears bleak.

[…]

By goading Saakashvili into war, Russia knew that Georgia’s Nato ambitions would be scuppered. European members had opposed an American push to fast-track Georgia’s membership precisely because of the unresolved issues of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

[…]

Passionate, colourful and instinctive, Saakashvili is often blinded by his visions for Georgia to such an extent that he becomes detached from reality.

Determined to remove the Soviet-era hangovers who dominated Georgia’s bureaucracy, the president thought that the best way to move the country towards liberal democracy was to replace them with educated youngsters. He surrounded himself with bright, earnest advisers in their twenties and thirties who had gone to college in America and had eagerly devoured the writings of Western economists and political scientists.

Masters of public relations, and brimming with enthusiasm, this cadre of clever and often beautiful young things essentially became Mr Saakashvili’s kitchen cabinet. But of experience in the intricacies of diplomacy and the treacheries of regional politics, they had little.

In going to war with Russia, the Georgian president took his counsel not from seasoned heads, but from what was essentially a university debating team. That mistake could cost Saakashvili his job.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/13/do1308.xml

Georgia: Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who lost it all

When he burst on to television screens across the world last week, speaking perfect English, Mikheil Saakashvili looked every inch the charismatic New York-trained lawyer that he is.

By Nick Allen , 13 Aug 2008

Known to friends as “Misha” the cosmopolitan 40-year-old is unquestionably brilliant, speaks half a dozen languages and has a Dutch wife he met in Paris.

But Mr Saakashvili has handed Russia a victory it could scarcely have dreamed of - his decision to invade South Ossetia has left his army humiliated and he could soon be fighting for his political life with no prospect of any meaningful help from his Western allies.

How did he make such a catastrophic blunder?

The answer appears to lie in Mr Saakashvili’s own character. While supporters praise him as a passionate and patriotic leader, whose drive and energy have transformed Georgia, critics say he is bombastic, impulsive and confrontational and his suave exterior hides a burning nationalist pride.

His abject defeat will hurt further still because it means the loss of long personal battle with Vladimir Putin.
A few years ago a document titled Mikheil Saakashvili: A Psychological Study, origin unknown, was circulated among Western journalists.

The now discredited paper claimed Mr Saakashvili’s behaviour was narcissistic, paranoid, egocentric and hysterical and showed “psychiatric disturbances”.
There is no doubt that Russia has been trying to undermine Mr Saakashvili for years.

According to diplomatic sources Russia stepped up its campaign to provoke him into a rash move in South Ossetia or Abkhazia - the two breakaway provinces of Georgia - over the last two weeks. There were occasional clashes and Russian jets entered Georgian airspace.

Mr Putin, it seems, knew just which buttons to push and Mr Saakashvili took the bait.

[…]

[…] critics say Mr Saakashvili grew into a populist demagogue with a ruthless lust for power after he returned to Georgia in October 2000 as justice minister under the then president Eduard Shevardnadze, who had met him in New York.

He ousted his former mentor in the bloodless Rose Revolution of 2003 and was greeted by the West as a hero who would spread democracy and freedom in the region. After becoming Europe’s youngest president he moved his country toward membership of Nato, led a successful crusade against corruption and saw Georgia praised globally as a beacon of democracy.

But now his critics will say his impetuousness triggered a crisis of Cold War proportions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2547517/Georgia-Mikheil-Saakashvili-the-man-who-lost-it-all.html