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Lionel Beehner, writing for the prestigous magazine Foreign Affairs reports on the gloom into which President Saakashvili's rule has now plunged Georgia:

The Iveria hotel

The tallest building in downtown Tbilisi is the former Intourist hotel, built during the Brezhnev era to host foreign visitors and later used to house Georgian refugees from the war in Abkhazia during the 1990s. Today the 16-story building is in the middle of a multimillion-dollar renovation and will reopen later this summer as a Radisson hotel. Its grandeur, however, is something of a mirage. The hotel dominates a skyline largely filled with ambitious construction projects in seemingly permanent states of half-completion -- glitzy, unfinished monuments to what might have been.

Ever since the Rose Revolution brought Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to power in 2003, the country has presented itself as a democratic, free-market oasis stuck on the edge of the post-Soviet world. For much of the West, particularly the United States, Georgia was an ally and a friend to be nurtured and protected. This dynamic reached a dramatic crescendo last August when Georgia and Russia fought a brief war over the breakaway province of South Ossetia -- a moment when John McCain, then a U.S. presidential candidate, boldly declared, "We are all Georgians."

But in the year since, the fallout from the war -- which has left Georgia with tens of thousands of internally displaced refugees -- has turned the country's machismo into a sense of defeatism and left it increasingly estranged from its Western friends, most especially the United States. Georgians -- who greet one another with a variation of the phrase for "victory" -- are growing tired of conflict and distrustful of their leadership. Support has grown for the country's opposition, a disparate collection of Western-educated reformers and former allies of Saakashvili who are disaffected by his heavy-handed rule.

After a moment of dominating international headlines last summer, Georgia is now figuratively -- and literally -- a rump of its former self.

He adds: The loss of land and prestige has dealt Georgia a devastating blow to its national ego, not to mention the image it has cultivated abroad as the standard-bearer for post-Soviet democracy. Even Saakashvili -- who, while skiing, wears a bright parka in Georgia's national colors of red and white -- has seen his trademark swagger and stubbornness replaced by humility. Last month, he told Georgia's parliament that reacquiring Abkahzia or South Ossetia is "not on the political agenda for any immediate action." This came as a shocking admission of weakness for many Georgians, akin to President Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech in 1979. Around the same time, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he admitted that Georgia's hopes to be fast-tracked for membership into NATO or the European Union are all but lost (though he later said he was misquoted). And his promise to restore the nation's democratic institutions -- namely, to remove media restrictions and make the courts more independent -- came across as an acknowledgment that he had violated the country's democracy in the first place when he used force to put down opposition demonstrations in November 2007.