What colour for Chisinau?

Tbilisi: As I write this, students have just been evicted from the parliament building in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, a day after storming it to show their despair at the idea of four more years of Communist rule there.

I’ve seen a few such popular revolts in my time (Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon), and happen to have spent last week hopping through the post-revolutionary capitals of Kiev and Tbilisi on vacation.

The simple conclusion: these uprisings, even when they’re successful, rarely mark a wholesale change from the past.

In Ukraine, tents still occupy part of the Maidan (otherwise known as Independence Square), just as they have almost continuously since the Orange Revolution in late 2004. But the politicians the world fell in love with back then – the brave Viktor Yushchenko, with his face bearing the scars of a poisoning attack, and the glamorous Yulia Tymoshenko, with her golden Princess Leia-like braids – quickly turned on each other after the people put them in power, and politics quickly returned to the dirty old status quo in Kiev.

What looked like a popular revolution back then (albeit one with plenty of outside support) turned out to be more about one clan of oligarchs ousting the other.

My closest Ukrainian friends, who five years ago were heavily politicized and energized by what had happened on the streets of Kiev, were disheartened and interested in talking about anything but Ukrainian politics when we had dinner last week. On the Maidan, you can still buy KGB T-shirts and Lenin paraphernalia, but not one vendor bothers to sell anything orange anymore. There’s just no interest, not even from tourists.

Other than a single column in front of the main post office – which has been encased in plexiglass to protect the revolutionary graffiti painted there five years ago – it’s as if the Orange Revolution never happened.

Georgia, despite last year’s disheartening war with Russia, provides more reason for optimism. Tbilisi in 2009 is a completely different place than the city I first visited back in the fall of 2002.

Collapsing buildings in the historic Old Town have been replaced by sidewalk cafés and jazz bars. The old Intourist hotel – which for more than a decade had been overflowing with refugees from the early 1990s war in Abkhazia – is now an almost-complete five-star Radisson. (The refugees were given compensation to move elsewhere in town.)

But, like Moldova, the country is held back because large chunks of Georgian territory are de facto Russian protectorates. Last summer’s war over South Ossetia proved a disastrous miscalculation by President Mikhail Saakashvili (that's him looking alternately frazzled and amorous in the posters I saw in downtown Tbilisi), and now tens of thousands of Georgians are back on the streets demanding that he step down, just as he forced Eduard Shevardnadze aside back in 2003. (Check out reporting from the scene by my longtime friend Michael Mainville of Dowling, Ont. – now the Caucasus bureau chief for Agence France-Presse.)

Neither the Rose Revolution in Georgia nor the Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought the people on the streets the change they were seeking. The change in governments only began a whole new cycle of instability and overt Russian intervention in both countries.

That’s something the angry students in Chisinau should probably keep in mind.

Russia and Georgia at war: how we got here

Just a quick post to highlight an article of mine on the war (and especially Mikhail Saakashvili's bizarre decision to attack South Ossetia) that was published today in The Globe and Mail. There's also an audio slideshow.

As fighting raged all over his tiny former Soviet country this week, a CNN anchor asked Georgia's brash and unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili whether he had believed his country could actually win a military showdown with Russia. "I'm not crazy," the President answered in his American-inflected English.

Others weren't so sure. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev charged that Mr. Saakashvili had acted like a "lunatic" in provoking the conflict and said he needed to be removed from office. A French diplomat suggested Mr. Saakashvili had been mad to take on Russia, and American officials wondered how he could have so badly misread their signals calling for restraint in his efforts to reclaim the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Many of his own people are shaking their heads at how "Misha," as he is affectionately known, could have backed their country into such a dangerous corner.

It was on Monday afternoon in the tree-lined city of Gori that Mr. Saakashvili came face to face with the scale of the error he made in attacking South Ossetia and triggering war with Russia, Georgia's giant neighbour to the north.

Sporting a green camouflage flak jacket, he was preparing to address the international media when Russian jets suddenly roared overhead. Someone in his entourage shouted, "Air! Air!" and Mr. Saakashvili looked at the sky, then broke into a sprint. Eventually he dove for cover, his bodyguards piling on top, hoping to shield their President from shrapnel.

Many bombs fell in and around Gori — the geographic heart of this strikingly beautiful country on the southeastern edge of Europe — and none came close to hurting him.

But the video of him ducking and running may prove to be the bookend to a tumultuous political career that began five years ago with another famous image: Mr. Saakashvili striding into Georgia's Soviet-era parliament building clutching a rose, at the vanguard of a democratic revolution that was supposed to remake not only his own tiny country but the entire former USSR.

Even if he remains in office after this crisis, the era of hope, democracy and pro-Western reform that Mr. Saakashvili — still boyish-looking at 40 — was supposed to herald has ended. The moment he ordered his troops to attack the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali a week ago, Georgia once more became a failed state, a place where wars, coups and instability are the norm and one that Western investors would be wise to avoid.

Georgia's loss is Russia's gain. Moscow is once again emerging as the regional hegemon, on the verge of pushing the U.S. back out of the former Soviet Union, an area Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calls "the near abroad." The leaders of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all former Soviet republics, rushed to stand with Mr. Saakashvili in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi this week in what was as much a demonstration of fear as it was of solidarity. They were joined by the President of Poland, another country that remembers when the Red Army regularly ranged far beyond its borders and thus fears Russia's resurgence.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is probably the most concerned member of the quintet. While Poland and the Baltic states are under the protective umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukraine is not. Along with Georgia's, its application to join NATO was shelved back in April for fear of offending Russia, which considers both states to be properly part of its "sphere of influence."

It all makes Mr. Saakashvili's decision to attack last Friday — while the world was distracted by the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games — extremely difficult to understand. In the name of "reuniting" Georgia, which has never been united since it gained independence in 1991, hundreds of people are dead (each side accuses the other of ethnic cleansing) and Georgia's sovereignty is under renewed threat.

As the sound of gunfire recedes, questions about Mr. Saakashvili's judgment — and his ability to continue governing — are growing louder.

Read the whole article here, and let me know what you think.

Misha's terrible gamble

I know Mikhail Saakashvili a little bit. I've met him a few times in Tbilisi, and have come to admire his raw idealism (rare in politicians these days) as well as his daring and determination. Those qualities made him the perfect leader five years ago when he led from the front as street protests against a flawed election turned into the Rose Revolution that propelled him to power. Then, in his first 12 months as president, he bowled over the naysayers by tackling endemic corruption in the police and public service and bringing the renegade province of Adjaria back under Tbilisi's control.

On subsequent visits, I couldn't help but be impressed. Life in Georgia was demonstrably better after the Rose Revolution than it had been beforehand. Saakashvili had his detractors, but even they couldn't deny that he was transforming the country and the region. The West (and Western investors) loved him, and Georgia's successes inspired copycat uprisings in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

But Misha's idealism and daring always had a dangerous side. His early victories led him to believe that it was only a matter of time before Georgia's other breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would also succumb to Mishamania. Ignoring the one thing he could never change about his country - the fact that Russia, no matter how hard he pushed it away and tried to resist its influence, would always be Georgia's giant neighbour and most important trading partner - he insisted on flicking the Russian bear in the nose, almost to see how far and how long he could get away with it. His neocon allies in the United States (notably including Senator John McCain) cheered him every step of the way in his fight against what they saw as renewed Russian imperialism.

Misha spited the Kremlin until Russia blocked imports of Georgian wines and the country's famous Borjomi mineral water, two of the tiny country's most lucrative exports. A Canadian leader who instigated such a trade war against our giant and powerful neighbour to the south wouldn't last through the next elections, but Misha did, though only after shedding his democrat's cloak to oversee a violent crackdown on opposition demonstrators in Tbilisi last fall.

His effort to get Georgia (along with Ukraine) into NATO was also foolhardy. He must have (or at least should have) known that the bid would fail since countries like Germany and France had signalled long beforehand that they weren't interested in admitting a country that had an outstanding territorial dispute with Russia. The only thing the bid accomplished was to further convince Moscow that Saakashvili was an enemy.

Misha's twin obsessions - battling Moscow and reestablishing control over Abkhazia ad South Ossetia - were bound to cause trouble at some point. But even those who know Saakashvili couldn't have predicted that he'd take it as far as to launch Friday's surprise attack on South Ossetia.

Even for a man of his well-chronicled volatility, it was an amazing gamble. And a very poorly thought out one. Hundreds of people are now dead, most of them civilians. Russian planes are striking all over Georgia and its troops and tanks have crossed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia proper. The Kremlin has made it clear that its end goal, one way or another, is to oust Saakashvili from power.

I'm not writing all this to defend Russia's actions. The idea of Russian troops in Gori - or Tbilisi - is abhorrent to me. But I can't for the life of me figure out what Misha (that's him in the photo, second from the right, taking cover during a Russian air raid on Gori) was thinking.

He must have known that attacking South Ossetia would provoke a massive, and disproportionate, Russian response. He should have realized that his government might not survive such a confrontation. And anyone who occasionally glances at the news could discern that his friends in America are far too concerned with places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to even consider aiding him militarily against the Russian army.

The West can kick and scream and call Vladimir Putin a monster, but there's little Washington and Brussels can do. Post-Iraq, the moral high ground has been ceded and there's no longer the necessary force to back it up anyway. And Saakashvili muddied the waters for many by launching the Friday assault on South Ossetia that left 10 Russian "peacekeepers" dead. One also wonders how Washington would react if Serbian troops launched a snap assault on Kosovo (another breakaway province under foreign protection that claims independence), killing 10 NATO troops in the process.

So why did Misha do it? Why were pride and South Ossetia worth risking his government and his country's sovereignty - not to mention the hundreds of people dead - for?

As day breaks in Tbilisi on the fifth day of this unnecessary war, I know I'm not the only one asking.

P.S. - For those of you in Canada, I'll be discussing all this tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. EST on Canada AM. I'll do it again on CTV Newsnet at 7 p.m.

Russia's high-stakes bet in Georgia

Russia's decision yesterday to establish thicker ties with Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was as predictable as it is inflammatory.

As Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili rightly protests, the Russian foreign ministry's declaration (Civil Georgia has provided a full text of it here) that it will recognize as legal all documents issued by the separatist governments is a step towards the de facto annexation of those two territories to Russia.

According to the Russian foreign ministry statement, President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to "interact with the actual bodies of power" in both places, and to build trade links with the regions.

This is hardly a surprising move. For years, the Kremlin has been granting Russian passports and citizenships to residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even those international law clearly recognizes both provinces as parts of Georgia. Russian citizens now make up a majority of the population in both places.

The Kremlin clearly foresaw a day when its hold over the two territories would be useful in a standoff with Tbilisi, the West or both.

Throughout the Kosovo crisis, Russia warned that if the West recognized Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, a strong Russian ally, it would re-evaluate its relationships with not only Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but perhaps the Transdniestr region of Moldova and the Srpska Respublika in Bosnia-Hercegovina as well. (The Kosovo example has also contributed to rising tensions between Georgia's neighbours, Armenia and Azerbaijan, over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh)

When the West (seemingly because it couldn't figure out what else to do with Kosovo) through its weight behind Pristina's UDI, the Kremlin had two choices: accept its dimished stature and do nothing - as Boris Yeltsin did while NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999 - or do something bold to make it clear that Russia's interests can no longer be ignored as they were a decade ago. For better and for worse, Putin has spent eight years choosing the latter route.

To Saakashvili's consolation, the U.S., the EU and NATO are tripping over themselves today to denounce Russia for "openly siding with separatists" and to call on the Kremlin to respect Georgia's sovereignty. Intentionally or not, their words and arguments are borrowed from Russia's reaction to the West's support for Kosovo.

The unanswered question is how far does Western support for Georgia's territorial integrity go? How would NATO - an organization that just promised Georgia future membership - react if Russia annexed two chunks of Georgian soil, or backed their independence?

The status quo in Eastern Europe is starting to slide away, just as it did in the early 1990s, when borders regularly fell away and new states were created seemingly every month. Back then, there was only one player at the table dictating the rules.

Yesterday, dangerously, the Kremlin anted up and declared that Russia back in the game. Mikhail Saakashvili is betting hard that it's a bluff.

The New Cold War on the road: if any readers are in London or Almaty next week, please feel free to come, say hello and argue with me. On Monday I'm giving a talk at the Cafe Diplo at The Gallery in Farringdon.

Friday, I'm in Kazakhstan to take part in the opening session of the Eurasian Media Forum alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gleb Pavlovsky and others. The theme is Cold War deja-vu.

The Kosovo conundrum

It sounds increasingly like Kosovo is going to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia tomorrow.

Whatever you think of the arguments for and against Kosovo becoming an independent state, it's a dangerous step that could provoke fresh violence not only in the Serbian areas of Kosovo (if Serbia is divisible, why isn't Kosovo?), but in ethnically divided Bosnia-Herzegovina as well. Leaders of the "Respublika Srpska" could be forgiven for wondering why - if Kosovo is allowed by the international community to go its own way - they can't also declare independence or push again for union with Serbia.

Russia's foreign ministry once more earned itself the enmity of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili last week when it linked the fate of Kosovo with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia's two breakaway regions. But the Russian stance has some merit: Why are the Kosovars more worthy of independence than the Abkhaz or the South Ossetians?

(It's worth noting here that many Georgians see the logic in what the Kremlin is saying: "Today there is no bigger problem for Georgia than possible recognition of Kosovo," Kakha Dzagania of the opposition Labor Party was quoted as saying yesterday. "That may become a precedent for recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.")

There are those who will argue that the Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatism movements are not genuine, that they are manufactured by the Kremlin as a way of maintaining influence over its former colony. While there's certainly some truth to this, you could say the same about Kosovo, which has been nurtured and protected by NATO since 1999.

My point here is not to argue for or against independence for Kosovo. But I do find myself wondering how the United States and the European Union find it reasonable to argue that the Kosovars deserve the right to determine their own fate, Serbia be damned, but other peoples of Eastern Europe in similar situations do not.

If Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence is going to get the support of the international community, let's make the right of national self-determination the new global standard. Let's set about determining the real will of the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians and back open and fair (not Russian-sponsored) referendums on whether they want to remain in Georgia. Then let's help them enforce the results.

Hell, while we're at it, let's do the same for the Transdniestr, the Respublika Srpska , Chechnya and the Crimea. If we're going to open this Pandora's Box in Eastern Europe, let's open it all the way.

Anything less looks like the West is picking favourites to suit its geopolitical agenda. And that's just begging for trouble.

S Novom Godom!

Я желаю Вам хорошее здоровье, удачу и успех в новый год!

Now back to business. I went silent for a little while. Very, very silent. Largely because my day job has been all-consuming of late, what with President Bush's tire-spinning visit to my current home, the Middle East.

That said, I'm off to Baku tomorrow for a weekend of pure relaxation by the Caspian Sea. The thought of returning to even the edge of the old USSR has me thinking:

Candidate Kasyanov - He's got the two million signatures. Does the Kremlin have the courage - and the barest commitment to democracy - to let him run against their man, Dmitriy Medvedev? Or are we going to see another "falsified signatures" charge in the coming days that will again prove that Russia is not inching towards democracy, but sliding back towards authoritarianism.

While we're at it, will Yavlinsky, Nemtsov and co. have the good sense to put their egos aside and back the only man with a hope of giving the Kremlin machine a run for its oil money?

Oleg Kozlovsky - His story is a warning, not only about fading freedom of speech in Russia, but about the biggest peril that many talented young Russians face - the draft. Many of my Russian friends spent most of their 20s doing anything - anything - to avoid being sucked into the dark and dangerous pit that is the Russian army. I've seen kids press-ganged off the streets of St. Petersburg while out walking with friends, and met soldiers in Chechnya whose parents didn't even know they were in the army, let alone stationed in Grozny. I'll wholeheartedly sign on to the Free Kozlovksy campaign, but add a note that there are thousands more like him, leading lower-profile lives, who also deserve our concern.

Much More Misha - Four more years of Saakashvili starts off with his government laying charges against tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili. Patarkatsishvili's no saint, but neither are Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If this was Putin laying charges against another oligarch, wouldn't we all be asking questions about whether the President isn't really just trying to quash all political opposition?

British Council tomfoolery - If the Russian government thinks the British Council is a den of spies, it should produce the evidence and expel those it no longer wants in the country. Otherwise, it should sending spooks to follow Council staff around St. Petersburg. It's an embarrassing saga, and not for the British.

Kosovo: I've asked the question before: why is the West so insistent that Serbia is divisible, but not Kosovo? (And not Georgia or Moldova?)

Azerbaijan 2016 - C'mon, really? This what President Ilham Aliev wants to spend all the oil money on? An expensive, sure-to-fail Olympics bid? What about the hundreds of thousands of Azeris who live in poverty, just outside the Baku bubble?

February 5: If it was the $26.95 that was keeping you from buying The New Cold War, never fear. The paperback edition hits bookshelves Feb. 5.

Snap elections in Georgia

News agencies have been reporting in the last few minutes that President Mikhail Saakashvili has declared there will be a snap presidential election on Jan. 5.

If true, it's a wise move by President Misha. His move to crack down on protests this week and declare a state of emergency smelled of the kind of autocracy he once stood against.

It's also politically smart: the opposition so far doesn't have a single figure it can rally around, now they have less than two months to find someone. Unless Nino Burjanadze, the popular speaker of parliament and a loyal Saakashvili ally, can be convinced to run against him, Saakashvili's main contender is likely to be the controversial ex-defense minister Irakli Okruashvili, who is currently in exile in Germany, avoiding prosecution on corruption charges.

Saakashvili's decision to deploy soldiers on the streets of Tbilisi to quell the opposition protests this week shouldn't be forgotten, or forgiven, but I'd still bet that Misha comes out of this smelling, well, like roses.

Tear gas in Tbilisi

The latest out of Georgia is that riot police, acting on the orders of President Mikhail Saakashvili, have dispersed several thousand anti-government protestors using tear gas, water cannons, fists and batons.

In a televised address, Saakashvili said the protests were part of a Russian plot to create unrest in the country. He promised he had "incontrovertible evidence" of such nefariousness that he would release "soon."

We'll see.

In the interim, a few things strike me about President Misha's crackdown, most of all that it's a final break with many of the people who helped bring him to power during the Rose Revolution four years ago. In contrast, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko - ever-conscious that it was the people who brought him to power - has tolerated all kinds of protests against his rule, some of which have blocked the centre of Kiev and left the country almost ungovernable for weeks at a time.

The people still own the streets in Ukraine, for better and for worse. That's no longer so in Georgia.

This quote, from Giga Bokeria, the head of Saakashvili's National Movement, was particularly jarring to me:

"This is absolutely normal for any Western democratic country," he told The Messenger newspaper in defense of the crackdown. Bokeria said the authorities had no choice ut to act once the protestors "made direct calls for the overthrow of the government."

This from one of the key plotters of the Rose Revolution, a man who helped plan the occupation of the centre of Tbilisi for three weeks in 2003. Back then, it was he who was calling for the overthrow of the government, so I guess it was OK.

More obvious hypocrisy: The pro-opposition Imedi TV was also taken off the air, apparently after police raided the studios (Imedi recently ran an interview from the exiled opposition figure Irakli Okruashvili in which he vowed that Saakashvili's "days are numbered.") Not so long ago, Bokeria and Saakashvili were among the crowd in the street, decrying the previous government for briefly shutting down the Rustavi-2 channel that was to Saakashvili's uprising what Imedi is today's protestors.

Regardless of the allegations of Russian involvement (and we must remember here that Saakashvili came to power with plenty of American help), Saakashvili is showing that he can and will crack down where Eduard Shevardnadze did not.

While researching my book, I interviewed Saakashvili and many others who helped plan and carry out the Rose Revolution. They all told me that one of the reasons they had the courage to remain in the streets for three chilly weeks back in 2003 was their conviction that Shevardnadze was not a complete autocrat. Unlike, say, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus or Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, they believed that the Silver Fox would not use force against his own people.

With some of his old Rose Revolution allies now arrayed against him, the tear gas and the water cannons were a message from Saakashvili to his former comrades that could be boiled down to "I know your game, I know how this works. Don't expect me to go as gently as Shevardnadze did."

And bringing down Saakashvili is exactly what the opposition now plans to do.

I'm torn about all this. I've written admiringly about the evident progress Georgia has made under Saakashvili. But it all risks coming undone if he starts behaving like just another post-Soviet autocrat.

It saddened me to see the scenes on Rustavelis Gamziri today.

A shout-out to a fellow blogger: Matthew Collin of This is Tbilisi Calling fame is filing great reports from the scene for BBC World.

The crisis this time

Poor Georgia. The country, perhaps more than any other former Soviet republic, has been in constant turmoil since the day the USSR dissolved. Wars, revolutions, mass protests - these things are as Georgian as khachapurri and over-sweet red wine.

Mikhail Saakashvili's rise to power via the Rose Revolution in 2003 was supposed to bring an end to all this. And if you were watching the slick government-bought commercials that are in heavy rotation on CNN ("And the winner is: Georgia"), you might believe that he'd succeeded in finally making the tiny Caucasian state into a stable, westward-looking, ready-for-Europe country.

But here we are exactly four years after the heady days of the Rose Revolution, and the streets are again full. Saakashvili can, with some reason, call the protests Russian-inspired but that doesn't negate the fact that the centre of Tbilisi is shut down and his government is facing its most serious challenge to date. And, of course, the Rose Revolution came about with more than a little American help.

Most opinion polls show that Saakashvili's National Movement is still easily the most popular party in the country, though he certainly wouldn't win 96 per cent support, as he did four years ago, in another presidential vote. But even the president has admitted that he's done a poor job of explaining why there isn't going to be fresh elections until next fall - five years after the last round. (Georgia previously had elections every four years, meaning this should be parliamentary election time, but Saakashvili changed the constitution two years ago so that presidential and parliamentary elections would be held together from now on.)

Saakashvili's inferences during his lengthy interview with Georgian TV about not wanting the country to be in an election cycle while Russia was holding its own parliamentary and presidential votes are fascinating. So too is his open linkage of the Kosovo crisis to the separatist regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Saakashvili clearly sees an international showdown coming, and doesn't want to have to deal with it and an election at the same time.

Still, the most interesting thing for me about these protests is the leading role of figures like Tinatin Khidasheli, who were once allies of Saakashvili's and who were instrumental members of the NGO coalition that brought about the Rose Revolution four years ago.

Back then, Saakashvili was their chosen saviour who would save Georgia from chaos and corruption. Now they're pining for the golden days of poor old Eduard Shevardnadze, whom history may once more come to judge kindly.

One more thing. I urge all of you to check out Natalia Antelava's beautifully written tribute to Alisher Saipov, the Uzbek journalist who was murdered last week, likely because of the work he did writing about corruption, torture and the betrayal of the people by Uzbek President Islam Karimov's government.

She gets it exactly right. The international media relies on people like Alisher Saipov to understand the countries that we're hurriedly sent to when a crisis breaks out. Without people like him (I can't help thinking and worrying of my own Uzbek friends right now), the story doesn't get out, and the thugocrats win.

As for the whodunnit, Antelava's piece leaves little question in my mind:

[Saipov's] paper was becoming increasingly popular ahead of the December presidential election, in which Mr Karimov is seeking re-election.

And, with its popularity, Alisher's name too was gaining prominence.

He was beginning to feature heavily on Uzbek state-controlled television, portrayed as a terrorist, a dangerous man with a hidden agenda of overthrowing the Uzbek state.

The last time I saw him he told me that there were even rumours that the Uzbek government had put a price on his head.

The wrong way to say thank you

Mikhail Saakashvili and his government owe the Bush Administration a favour. That's well known. Without the overt and covert support of the U.S. (and billionaire financier George Soros), the 2003 "Rose Revolution" probably never would have happened, and Eduard Shevardnadze would likely still be Georgia's president.

And yes, with Russia trying to economically strangle its smaller neighbour with crushing sanctions on Georgian exports of wine and mineral water, Saakashvili and co. need all the big, powerful friends they can get right now.

Still, the decision to more than double the number of Georgian troops fighting alongside the U.S. in its misguided war in Iraq boggles the mind.

On Friday, Georgia's parliament voted to increase the troop deployment from 850 to 2,000. Many of these will be deployed in and around Baghdad, very likely putting them in the line of fire.

While many of the troops are said to be willing to go because they receive nearly triple their regular pay while in Iraq (thanks to the U.S., which pays nearly two-thirds of their salaries), Saakashvili is nonetheless putting his country on the wrong side of history here.

Unlike most, if not all, of the Georgian parliamentarians, I have been to Iraq five times since 2003, and can tell you that each subsequent trip was more dangerous for me personally. Simply put, the country is disintegrating, likely into three parts.

I've also met Mr. Saakashvili twice, and if he granted me a third meeting, I'd tell him bluntly that sending an extra 1,150 Georgian soldiers to Baghdad won't stop this, and that sending them there is misguided and more than a little sycophantic.

Of the few who once shared Bush's vision of reshaping the Middle East through toppling Saddam Hussein and ridding the country of its phantom weapons of mass destruction, Britain is leaving and Italy and Spain have left.

Georgia, too, has done its time, having initially committed troops back in August 2003.

Parliamentary speaker Nino Burdzhanadze said Georgia made the decision to up the number of troops because the country "knows the price of friendship, and will never forget the support that has been provided" by America.

If sticking with Bush to the end of his foolhardy war is really the price of America's friendship, it's far too high. A real friend would tell him that.