David Cameron, recently installed as the new prime minister in the United Kingdom, has spoken by phone with Mikheil Saakasvili, reiterating that the UK's politicial position of support for Georgian territorial integrity and opposition to Russian occupation was unchanged.

But - in a wearingly familiar manner - Saakashvili's spin doctors were not content with telling that simple truth and instead decided to gush about how personally supportive David Cameron is of Mikheil Saakashvili and his government. The president's chief spin doctor Manana Manjgaladze said:

David Cameron was the politician who permanently raised Georgian issue in legislative body of Great Britain

Well, one might suppose the term "permanently raised" is open to interpretation, but one would also doubt that raising the issue once - in a reply to a prime ministerial statement on 20 October 2008 comes close to anyone's definition of "permanently" raising anything.

There is no evidence to suggest - that we can find - that David Cameron in any way dissents from the previous Labour government's view that Georgia was subject to aggressive Russian provocation but that its response in seeking to take military control of Tskhinvali was deeply mistaken.

It is certainly the case that, having been to Georgia in August 2008, Cameron took a very strongly supportive stance towards Saakashvili (the picture here shows their meeting then). But since then we have had both the Tagliavini Commission (and more importantly the Georgian government's reaction to it) and the scandal of the faked Imedi bulletin of 13 March this year: two key events in souring the western attitude to Saakashvili's regime.

It ought to be the best of times for Mikheil Saakashvili who now looks more secure than ever in his position as president of Georgia: it will now take an extraordinary turn of events or a mis-step even greater than his August 2008 tumble into the South Ossetian trap to remove him from office before the end of his 2013 term.
The low level rumbling about the threat of Russian invasion – lately boosted by internet-inspired rumours that Russian occupation troops in South Ossetia were being prepared for an attack on Georgian forces: almost certainly comes from the Georgian regime or its allies. There is simply no rationale for Russia to waste blood and gold on invasion as Saakashvili has already delivered on the Russian strategic aim – keeping NATO away from its southern border.
And therein lies the reason why, for at least those with a strategic mindset in Tbilisi’s corridors of power, this must be very far from the best of times. Georgia’s foreign policy is in free-fall: western defence ministers promise mañana on the country’s NATO membership, the US president coolly says Russian occupation of Georgian territory is no longer a blockage on treaties with the Kremlin, the European Commission comes to Tbilisi to take pot-shots at the country’s economic policy and even commentators who are fundamentally sympathetic to the Georgian president can no longer stomach the stench of hypocrisy from the Avlabari palace.
Looking at all this in the round it is clear that Saakashvili’s slide in western eyes started to get serious with the publication of the Tagliavini report in September last year. For reasons which are difficult to understand from any rational starting point, Saakashvili’s narrative of the events of the August war of 2008 was based on the idea that he was responding to a full scale Russian invasion (at one point going so far as to claim over 100,000 Russians were attacking - see video)

Panarama: Portrait of Mikheil Saakashvili from Ivan Panarama on Vimeo.

. Predictably Tagliavini tore that claim to shreds and Saakashvili was left in a much weaker position than if had started from what seems to be the truth: he ordered the attack on Tskhinvali because he feared if he had not then any hopes the Georgian side had of restoring “constitutional order” by force would evaporate. Western leaders may not have liked the admission that their protege used force against his own people, but no one would have disputed that the Georgian mission – which, however badly, was constrained to legitimate military objectives – was at least an internal matter.
But the problem with the official narrative was nothing as compared to the issue of how the Saakashvili regime dealt with the report. Inside Georgia the regime kept the report – apart from the briefest of mentions – off the national TV news for two days while they formulated their attack, which essentially boiled down to saying that it was written by naive idiots. Subsequently this has been broadened into a comparison with the appeasers of Adolf Hitler and a claim that members of the commission were bribed by Russia.
Thanks to the effective monopoly the regime enjoys on national television these stories are no doubt believed by a substantial number of people in Georgia – but outside the country they created the image of a president who was unable to take responsibility and who had no intention of allowing a mature debate inside the country.
Throughout the autumn and winter the Georgian regime only made things worse for itself internationally by consciously and deliberately talking up the prospects of war with Russia. School children were to be taught how to use guns, every Georgian was told to be ready to fight, a war with Russia was inevitable and so on.
Such talk is cheap in the Caucasian winter: there is no realistic prospect of an invasion across the mountains between October and June. Domestically it suited the president and his cronies just fine – especially as the implication was that the opposition would in some way be responsible for the war. But internationally this was a slow drip of poison: the Georgians did not seem to realise that the rules of the game had changed now that Tagliavini had crushed their alibi for August 2008.
Then came the earthquake of the faked Imedi news bulletin of 13 March. That really marked the point of no return for many in the west. It is impossible to imagine that western leaders are going to sign up to a military alliance that obligates mutual defence with a country that is led by a man who was prepared not so much as to play with fire, but to douse his house in petrol and start flicking matches around.
Perhaps there might have been a way back if Saakashvili had said sorry and promised to clean up his act. But he did the opposite – defending the fakery and describing complaints of media manipulation as “total bullshit”.
Of course, in a way all this has worked for Misha. There is little doubt that the UNM will not just win the elections on 30 May: they are likely to maintain their monopoly of power. Media monitors have descended on Tbilisi and will report that, actually, the media are giving the opposition a reasonably fair crack of the whip – in what little coverage they are giving the election. But that is because the poll is already won for the government, the only outstanding issue now is whether the real radicals in the opposition manage to provoke the government to a public display of violence before 30 May.
Of course, the opposition is just as much – perhaps even more – to blame for the crushing electoral defeat that is coming their way. For too long they behaved as though the electorate were bit part actors in all this as opposed to the people in ultimate control and, in Tbilisi, in particular, they ignored the real lessons of last Spring’s protests: that the people had had enough of blow hard protestors and wanted politicians who addressed the practical issues of everyday life. Gigi Ugulava’s victory on 30 May will significantly rest on his ability to look as though as he is focused on those issues as much as any manipulation.
But for the regime it will be a hollow victory: because the they have let tactics dictate the strategy. And despite the Kremlin’s playing of footsie with minor Georgian politicians and people who really ought to know better, Putin and Medvedev are likely to be quite happy to see the UNM win, especially as Georgia's failure with the west seems to be driving the regime towards forming some very bizarre alliances which will only make the prospects of joining the Euro-Atlantic mainstream receed ever further into the distance.
 

Under Mikheil Saakashvili military spending shot through the ceiling and the view of the Tagliavini Commission was that the president and his government were spending for a purpose - perhaps to force the issue in Abkhazia.

But, instead, they found themselves drawn into a conflict in South Ossetia - falling victim to Russian provocation and their own mistaken belief that as South Ossetia was of little or no strategic value the Russians would not fight for it.

So in August 2008 Georgian troops advanced into Tskhinvali and the president proclaimed the inevitability of victory and the redemption of one piece of Georgia, only for overwhelming Russian force to see the army break and flee.

The Russians - leaving aside even their sponsorship of ethnic cleansing - did not cover themselves in military glory, their mighty army - the inheritors of Zhukov and Malinovsky - and air force put under serious pressure by the Georgian minnows, but they at least won. The Georgian forces were in the end routed.

And the result has been a breakdown in trust between the armed forces and the political commanders. It is an open secret that most serious army commanders believe they were forced into conflict for political reasons at a bad time (the elite of Georgia's military were actually in Iraq at the time) and that the political command was a shambles - Gigi Ugulava  playing a central role before fleeing when things got hairy.

For their part the politicians think they were disgraced by an army that in the end, and despite all the money lavished on it. crumbled at the moment when it needed to stand firm.

The mistrust runs deep. The "Mukhrovani Mutiny" of May 2009 was said to be a protest of army officers about being asked to salute politicians they felt they could no longer honour, while the government said it was a Russian sponsored coup attempt (though brought no evidence to back this claim up to the court case that followed).

Then, on 13 March, a key element of the Imedi faked news broadcast was the claim that part of the army had gone over to the opposition - which in this context meant it had voluntarily signed up to Russian overlordship. Whether or not one believes the tape of a phone call between Imedi's chief Giorgi Arveladze and his deputy about the programme - in which Arveladze says "Misha" has seen and approved the faked bulletin - is genuine, it is clear that the programme reflected the inner political thinking of the regime, and so shows that they regard the army not as a bulwark of Georgian sovreignity but as a weak spot.

The breakdown of trust is discussed at length by expert Irakli Sesiashvili in an interview with the Georgian Times today and, as he says:

The President always used to boast that we were creating the best army in the region. However non-professionals were running the Army and because of this it was destroyed in three days. Rather than thinking about gaining more political points Saakashvili is now scared of the Army. This was proven on 5 May 2009 during the so-called Mukhrovani Mutiny and by the hoax report recently broadcast on Imedi TV. It is clear that the Government thinks that the Army might betray it and the main reason is that the Army really is discontented due to the failures in the war and the wrong political turns which affect it.
 

Once that is understood some of the wilder things that Mikheil Saakashvili has said in recent months - about how the army is not enough and that every Georgian ought to be willing to fight - comes into focus. And it also shows why he has appointed Bacho Akhalaia - essentially a proxy for interior minister Vano Merabishvili - as defence minister and sacked so much of the upper echelons of the army.

The interior ministry's forces loyalty to the regime is unquestioned - as was demonstrated when they clubbed peaceful demonstrators with wooden staves and then stormed Imedi on 7 November 2007 or on 15 June last year when they went berserk outside the police headquarters.

But it also makes it clearer than ever why, so long as Saakashvili is in office, there is no realistic chance of Georgia joining NATO: there is just no way that the alliance is going to assent to entering into to legal guarantee of military aid with a country that is increasingly organising its armed forces as a party militia.

Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili has blamed the western military alliance for his country's war with Russia in 2008.

Interviewed by the Russian Vlast magazine the Georgian president (pictured, right, with former US president George W. Bush) said, reports Bloomberg's Business Week, that the decision of NATO to refuse him a "membership action plan" in April 2008 had sent the "wrong signal" to Russian leaders and encouraged them to enact a long planned attack on his country.

The European Union's Tagliavini Commission into the war of August 2008 published their conclusions into who started the conflict in September last year. Blaming Georgia for breaching international law by shelling Tskhinvali in the breakaway province of South Ossetia and so beginning the five days of intense conflict, they also cited Russian provocations and treaty breaches as contributory factors.

President Saakashvili has veered between saying the Commission's report has vindicated him and saying it is a report produced by a team bribed by Russian energy and media giant Gazprom.

The president also said he had a standing invitation to visit US president Barack Obama in Washington DC. Saakashvili's inability or unwillingness to meet western leaders (on his recent trip to London he did not get to see the British Prime Minister) has caused unfavourable comment at home in recent weeks.

The Committee to Protect Journalists have published a depressing summary of the Saakashvili regime's attacks on media freedom in Georgia in 2009.

While no journalists were killed or imprisoned in Georgia in 2009, press freedom in this small South Caucasus nation stagnated due to persistent state manipulation of news media, particularly television broadcasting. In a speech before the U.N. General Assembly in September, President Mikhail Saakashvili boasted of Georgia’s media pluralism, stating that the country has “27 TV stations.” He failed to mention that most stations have little reach and, notably, that his government and its allies have long sought to control television news content, most recently through aggressive efforts to obstruct the cable affiliates of a station aligned with a leading opponent.

The assessment continues:

Saakashvili had enjoyed strong support from the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, but his government's ongoing media manipulation eroded his reputation as a democracy builder. During a visit to Georgia in July, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden urged Saakashvili to make his government more transparent and accountable by fostering independent and professional media. In an October interview with the news agency GHN, Lasha Tugushi, editor of the independent Tbilisi-based daily Rezonansi, said he believed press freedom was declining. "There are no more [national] television debates and discussions, the information programs are worse, and property rights are not regulated and defended," Tugushi said, referring to the government's continued encroachment on privately owned media corporations.

The CPJ say that the government have been engaged in "years-long efforts" to seize control of the national media and discusses the handling of the reporting of the Tagliavini Commission report:

A critical European Union fact-finding report on the August 2008 armed conflict between Russia and Georgia was a failed litmus test for national television. The networks were either silent about the report’s findings or chose to air only conclusions favorable to the Georgian side. The report, written by seasoned diplomat Heidi Tagliavini and issued in October, found that while Russia created various provocations and escalated the war, Georgia bore responsibility for instigating the conflict with its shelling of Tskhinvali. The EU report also called on the media to curb xenophobic sentiments and to provide a balanced view of all sides of the conflict.

In an op-ed piece published in The Guardian of London, the opposition leader [Nino Burjanadze] said administration policies had ensured that coverage of the EU report was one-sided. While opposition voices can get a hearing in newspapers and on cable television, Burdzhanadze said, their impact is diminished due to presidential control over national broadcasting. For two-thirds of the country, national television channels are the only media available, “and all are directed by the president’s inner circle,”