More than a decade before he became Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili was just another struggling law student with big plans tooling around Manhattan on his bicycle.

"He was ambitious, idealistic, and I think he had something of the American messianic sense that you could use law to change the world," recalls professor Lori Damrosch, who taught Saakashvili in a Columbia law seminar entitled International Institutions in Transition.

"This was at a time of turmoil in the ex-Soviet republics, and he had a lot to say on those topics," she adds, noting that students at the law school were "imbued with this idealistic spirit" and that Saakashvili "absorbed these values."

With his country now bloodied after a clash with Russia and his leadership questioned, the overarching idealism of his New York student days would seem to have been finally shaken.

Critics have certainly come out of the woodwork, saying that the loss of Georgia's breakaway regions, particularly that of South Ossetia, would foment protest to Saakashvili's rule. Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, has said that the war brought on by Saakashvili's futile and perhaps rash attempt to secure the areas "pushed Georgia further away not just from Europe, but also complicates the NATO council in December." And Michael Evans, defense editor for the Times of London, noted that Saakashvili's "military adventure had all the hallmarks of rushed planning and a finger-crossed strategy," adding that the Georgian president gave Vladimir Putin  "the opportunity he was waiting for to stamp his authority over Georgia and at the same time to cock a snoot at the West."

So far, Saakashvili has not wavered. He continues to hammer out a drumbeat of statements aimed at presenting himself as the biblical David, Russia as the corrupt Goliath intent upon creating a new iron curtain, and Georgia as the thin edge of the wedge.

"Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

He has failed to persuade the West to send in reinforcements. With Russia still marching into new cities, the best news that Georgia could muster so far this week was word that its Olympic beach volleyball team had trounced the Russians in two out of three rounds.

Saakashvili would have likely modeled for a more robust response from the West. Well studied in the intricate dance among nations, he wrote a seminar paper on humanitarian intervention, which focused on ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet satellite states.

Unlike many other 1994 graduates of Columbia Law School, Saakashvili put his training to the test on the world stage.

By 1996, Saakashvili, who idolizes John F. Kennedy and leans politically toward John McCain, had already jettisoned a doctoral thesis at George Washington University Law School, quit the high-power law firm of Patterson Belknap and won a parliamentary seat in the Republic of Georgia (population 4.4 million).

This was the first of many leaps that would, in a short and bloodless coup, move Saakashvili into the presidency, an ascendancy that Saakashvili has said was helped along by the knowledge that he acquired while a law student in the United States.