NOT EVEN PERVEZ Musharraf has the gall to invoke one of the most hackneyed excuses of the megalomaniacal tyrant who pounds his people into submission: “This hurts me just as much as it hurts you.” Yet when Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili’s announced a state of emergency last Wednesday, after tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets in defiance of his rule and were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets for their troubles, it was as if history itself were inviting comparison between the Caucasus and the subcontinent.
The situation in Georgia is symbolically worse than the one in Pakistan, however, because Saakashvili used to be known as exactly the kind of fresh new democrat the Bush Doctrine hoped to promote in the developing world. A New York-educated lawyer with strong pro-American leanings, he was elected in 2003 in the aftermath of Georgia’s Rose Revolution, which unhorsed the ossified ex-Soviet satrap Eduard Shevardnadze. In his brief tenure as president, Saakashvili has overseen an impressive decrease in state and industrial corruption–so much so that in 2006 the World Bank rated Georgia the top economic reformer in the world and 18th in terms of “ease of doing business.”
