>>>
>>I'm hardly well-informed on Georgian politics, but anyway...
>
><TSK!> What are we to do! Our one reliable set of ears in the field!
>"Hardly well-informed" he says! How can we find stuff to talk about! Oh
>woe! !{)>
Hey! It's far away!
BTW I can alreasy see speculation that this was some kind of CIA plot to get rid of Shev because he had sold the country's power grid to Russia's UES. I don't know much about Georgian politics, but I do not plenty of Georgians, and Shev is about as popular in Georgia as Yeltsin was in Russia in 1998. He is one hated motherfucker. You don't need the CIA to swing the army, which is largely unpaid, against a leader like that.
Moreover, UES got the power grid because the previous owner, a US company, cut and ran because of lack of profits. Unless the US has some kind of state-run power company like UES that doesn't make profit its sine plus non, it's not going to be able to do anything.
>
>Does that make him "pro-Western"?
I meant that he was talking about joining NATO and the EU (probably illusory hopes).
>
>Maybe it's not so much the Kremlin as Washington simply doesn't really give
>a rat's ass at the moment, having more important fish to fry. They don't
>care who's in power so long as the place is relatively quiet.
>
>Todd
I think that's probably right. In any case, Georgia is in such straits that any leader will hardly have much room to maneuver. Whoever is in power will probably continue Shev's forieng policy, which was dictated by being between a rock and a hard place, not choice, as far as I can tell.
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