The World According to Misha: Georgia’s Saakashvili

The weary dissidents and opposition leaders of Tbilisi call it the Show, the ready display of virility and political kinetics that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili reserves for the many visitors whose good opinion he seeks. “I’m sure you’ll be charmed,” says Tinatin Khidasheli, a human-rights lawyer who is a leader of the opposition Republican Party of Georgia, over espresso and cigarettes at the brand-new Radisson Tbilisi. “Everyone always is.”

The Show is a little different for each visitor. For Senator John McCain, it meant jet-skiing with Saakashvili on the Black Sea. Vice President Joe Biden was treated to a twirling, leaping folk-dance spectacular in Tbilisi. More than a few reporters have been granted late-night interviews on Saakashvili’s presidential plane, a sleek Bombardier Challenger stocked with cognac and patriotic Georgian music videos.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “Georgian Spring.”)

My Show began a short while after the one-year anniversary of Georgia’s ill-fated war with Russia. A report by the European Union blaming both Russia and Georgia for the conflict was about to be released, but word had already leaked 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.

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.

Saakashvili still has the immense talent for communication that made him an international celebrity when he took power after 2003’s bloodless Rose Revolution. He’s an imposing man — at 6 ft. 4 in. (193 cm), he is the tallest Georgian I saw until we watched the national basketball team beat Belarus — with a polyglot charisma. At various times throughout the week, he spoke to me in Russian, Spanish and — above all — his famous English, an enthusiastic tumble of idiomatic American that he learned while studying and practicing law in New York City and Washington.

(See pictures of the Russians in Ossetia.)

But the question isn’t Saakashvili’s charm; it’s the quality of his vision for Georgia and whether his wary allies can trust him to lead his country there. The stakes are high. This tiny country half the size of North Carolina is the rawest point of contact between the rising confidence of Russia and the eastward encroachment of the great Western alliances — NATO and the E.U. Yet the most crucial conflict may be the one within Saakashvili himself, between his enormous ambitions for Georgia and the impetuousness that could yet spoil his young democracy or bring more bloodshed to the Caucasus.

The Road to War
Our first flight 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 as it did last year.

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 led to a wider conflict.

One of Saakashvili’s earliest political promises in 2004 was to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back in Georgia’s fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it 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.'”

Read an interview with Saakashvili.

See TIME’s special report on the Georgia-Russian crisis.

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 (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?”

The war lasted five days, but the danger continues. Russia, which has recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states (only Nicaragua and Venezuela have followed suit), has evicted all international monitors from the territories and is most likely arming those areas to the teeth. Georgia’s new Defense Minister, Bacho Akhalaia, told me the Georgian army will “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.)

A 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.

His 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 that was too distracted to pay attention. President Obama has essentially the same policies, but now “it’s much better implementation.”

(See pictures of Obama in Russia.)

“The 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.

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.

Unlike many Georgians, Saakashvili doesn’t smoke. He drinks, but less than those around him. He is almost compulsively social and enjoys the company of beautiful women. On the wall of his office is a series of photos of him picking up the Georgian-born British pop star Katie Melua, 25, like a newlywed crossing the threshold. More than anything, though, Saakashvili is restless. His jitters can at times make him seem like an overgrown adolescent. Cameras caught him chewing nervously on his tie during last August’s war, a gesture he has been careful not to repeat. In my presence, he caught himself several times gnawing, ever so slightly, on the corner of a handkerchief. But these tics are a small price to pay for his biggest asset: his tremendous, limitless energy. Columbia’s Mitchell calls it “government by adrenaline.” Saakashvili is addicted to quick, dramatic acts of leadership. Particularly in the early years, he got results. One example: when he came to power, Georgia’s traffic police were notorious bribe seekers. So he fired every one of them and hired an entirely new, clean police force.

See pictures of Russia reveling in Victory Day.

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After last year’s war, with his military routed, Saakashvili latched on to development as a sort of defense guarantee: “It’s very uncomfortable to bomb skyscrapers. It looks very, very ugly.” He said he spends 80% of his time looking for investors, cooking up projects and cheerleading for the Georgian economy.

His current obsession is the town of Batumi, which is developing at a speed that would make China blush. John Steinbeck called Batumi a “very pleasant little tropical city” after a 1948 visit there, but he would not recognize it now. There’s a water park and countless neon-lit fountains that burble in sync with songs like “Pretty Woman” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” The town centerpiece is a long promenade with 800 palm trees, sleek benches designed in Valencia, Spain, and an artificial river lit neon blue. Working through the night, workers built the place in three months. Construction unions, Saakashvili joked, would come to Georgia only “when everything is already built.” One of the renovated plazas will host a giant civic New Year’s Eve concert featuring Julio Iglesias, whom Saakashvili decided to hire for just over $1 million. While going over blueprints with his Spanish architects, Saakashvili told me he likes buildings that are “original, crazy and brave.” He said Batumi could be “the next Dubai.” He then produced a set of plans for the drab 2014 Olympic Village that the Russians are building just down the coast in Sochi, so everyone could have a laugh at the dullness of his enemy’s architects.

(See pictures of the Georgia conflict aftermath.)

Troubles at Home
Saakashvili’s grand plans don’t impress his opponents. They think that he — like most other leaders in this part of the world — is power-mad. The media and judiciary still aren’t nearly independent enough. The opposition, whom Vice Prime Minister Temuri Yakobashvili dismissed as “losers, naifs and traitors,” says it is persecuted for its dissent. “This energy and force [Saakashvili] has inside is a rare quality,” says Sozar Subari, who was until recently Georgia’s public defender. “But unfortunately, he used this to strengthen autocracy, not democracy.”

Saakashvili has faced two major challenges to his leadership. In November 2007, his riot police responded to antigovernment demonstrators by beating them, arresting their leaders and shutting down two television stations. In April, the opposition took to the streets again to call for his resignation. But this time, Saakashvili was restrained. He let the protesters shut down the streets of the capital. Georgians grew tired of the inconvenience, and eventually everyone went home. Many opposition figures say they won’t try to force him to resign before his term ends in 2013. Even Khidasheli, an ardent critic of the President, assured me, “We will not allow a revolution.”

This means that the future of Georgia once again rests almost entirely on the balance between Saakashvili’s good and bad impulses. The case of Irakli Alasania, Georgia’s former U.N. ambassador and the country’s most credible opposition figure, may provide insight into which side of the President prevails. Several weeks before he officially made the announcement, Alasania told me he was planning to run next spring for mayor of Tbilisi, with the former public defender Subari on his ticket. Allowing such well-respected statesmen to run a free campaign would instantly legitimize the idea of multiparty democracy in Georgia. It would also set the stage for something many critics still doubt Saakashvili can deliver: a credible presidential election in 2013, followed by a peaceful transfer of power.

The 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.

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