Outpost of the new Cold War.

• Author: Mairowitz, David Zane

As I start to buckle up for the ride from the airport into Tbilisi, my friends look at me in disbelief and derision. Nobody, but nobody, uses a seat belt here. "It's for decoration," I'm told. Welcome to Georgia, enjoy the ride.

The streets here have not been paved since the time of the Soviet Union. Driving is all about avoiding enormous potholes, even if this means heading down the opposite side of the road against oncoming traffic. In any case, there are no white lines dividing the road, and traffic lights are a game. Maybe once there were rules here; now it's just a question of going headfirst, come what may.

This is a country whose infrastructure has all but disappeared since its independence from the Soviet Union twelve years ago. In that time, there have been three mini-"revolutions" and a civil war. Unlike the post-communist success stories in the Baltics, Georgia is an economic and social basket case, a country no one seems to want. The European Union, happy to embrace other tiny ex-Soviet republics, has virtually ignored this one. There is a "special" European envoy here. This is to avoid having a "normal" representative, Regis Gente, editor of a French newspaper in Tbilisi, La Vie en Georgie, tells me.

And yet this no man's land stands in the middle of a post-Cold War power struggle between Russia and the United States, which has implications for the economic and political stability of the entire trans-Caucasian region, as well as for the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. For years, ex-President Edouard Shevardnadze played both sides of the fence, happily accepting more than $1 billion in American aid--only second per capita behind the state of Israel--while keeping his Russian options open. His departure during November's revolution of roses changes the equation. His successor, Columbia University educated Mikhail Saakashvili, is decidedly pro-Western.

Just weeks before the contested elections on November 2, several U.S. VIPs like John McCain, John Shalikashvili, Strobe Talbott, and James Baker (whose law firm, Baker Botts, was hired by BP to lobby for its oil interests in Georgia) arrived in Tbilisi underlining the need for fair elections and bringing a plan for reforming the Georgian electoral system. Shevardnadze fixed the elections, and during the ensuing crisis, U.S. Ambassador Richard Miles went back and forth between the contestants, apparently trying to broker a compromise. Miles was also U.S. chief of mission to Yugoslavia shortly before the Milosevic...