He should have phoned Musharraf before taking his 15 minutes (quite literally) of fame in the US Green (lime)light.

There was also the suspicious death of the one remaining political counterweight to his power,his popular prime minister in 2005.

OSI lessons in democracy must have encouraged Saakasvili to favour the more partial forms of democracy congenial to his rent-a-crowd elite sponsors like Soros.Moreover Saakasvili’s priority commitment was immediately to position Georgia as a NATO proxy-in-waiting fully armed and sponsored by the Western bloc prior to seeking to bring about any substantial economic development for Georgian citizens.

Putting it bluntly Washington’s protegy was all guns and no butter!

Now Saakashvilli will pay for that choice of priorities.

As Dimitri Simes argued convincingly in a Foreign Affairs piece,at the end of 2007 before these events transpired,the Russian operation to squash Georgian aspirations to forcibly integrate S.Ossetia and Abkhazia would be resounding and long-awaited pay-back not just for Western sponsorship of an independent Kosovo irrespective of Serbian/Russian objections,but for years of disdainful treatment of Russia at the hands of the US.

Kosovo set a precedent all too clear to the Russians but evidently lost on US “diplomats” and negotiators like Holbrooke.Most unrecognised former Soviet territories are keen like Ossetia and Abkhazia for independence leading to full integration with Russia not NATO and the western bloc as was the case in the Balkans.

All the bluster and hypocrisy of the US and its allies especially the UK is evident in the predictable denunciations of Russia’s political use of energy as a stick with which to beat troublesome pro-western proxies on its southern borders like Georgia and Ukraine.

Lest we forget with regard to Iraq and now Iran one would be hard pushed to find two powers more ready to use economic sanctions against perceived enemies
than these two aggressive imperialist ones.

Again,whereas the US like the British Empire before them,have been keen to use target ethnically and religiously mixed regions where it is easy to foment nationalist and separatist sensitivities as a means to forward their agenda of effecting Russia’s encirclement,Russia has refrained from antagonizing the US by inciting such passions among the Russian minority in Ukraine.

Global perceptions of US power have been damaged by the perception that Rice et al gave Saakashvili the green light and the expectation of US intervention on his behalf against Russia.

Worse the still the sight of Washington’s client cowering beneath security guards as Russian planes flew over his territory will not have been at all reassuring for any of Washington’s current or potential allies.

The Georgian army were ejected from the territory by Yeltsin’s military intervention in 1994.Granted the Russians did not press their advantage at that stage and advance further into Georgia but then they had not had to watch for over the decade while the US with Israeli assistance built up the Georgian military infrastructure.

Likewise the Russians remained pretty passive while George Soros and his Open Society networks fomented the series of phoney democracy insurgencies or “orange” and “rose” revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia.

In the latter of course they helped facilitate the ouster of Shevardnaze and the installation of Sakashvili with the consequences we see today.