Word: saakashvili
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...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...
...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...
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...