Obama, Misha and the Bear

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

TBILISI, Georgia

A wounded, angry bear is loose north of here, and it has people terrified.

The bear has ravaged this lovely country, a booming capitalist enclave that worships America, relies on a much-praised flat tax and has uprooted corruption almost overnight (in part by firing every traffic cop in the country).

A main road here is named for President George W. Bush, who visited in 2005. Everybody studies English, sometimes in the local McDonald’s franchises, and people seem bewildered at Western doubts about their behavior toward the Russians.

“We thought we had escaped them, and they came back and raped us,” said Alexander Rondeli, who runs a think tank in Tbilisi. “And people in the West are saying we have to tell them to be our guest.”

The architect of today’s Georgia is Mikheil Saakashvili. Misha, as he is universally known, is young, brilliant, charismatic, American-educated and staffs his government with people like him. You get the sense that any given Georgian cabinet official is about half the age and double the I.Q. of his or her American equivalent.

(More here.)