The US has trained and equipped Georgian military forces [EPA]

The US has had stern words for Russia over its military intervention in Georgia to back South Ossietian separatists, but many analysts say that the Bush administration must share the blame for the crisis.

Washington has formed a close bond with the government of Mikheil Saakashvili since he came to power in the 2003 'Rose Revolution,' offering military and economic aid and encouraging Georgia to join Nato.

Jon Sawyer, the director for the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting, said US politicians had encouraged their Georgian counterparts to think they had the backing of the US when Tbilisi decided to launch its attack on South Ossetia last week.

"The US has for several years now mishandled the situation in Georgia," he said.

"The way that Mikheil Saakashvili has approached this [has been by] thinking that he could be an extension of the west, a partner of the United States."

"In many ways we have given him cause for thinking that, with the many visits to the United States, the talk of Georgia as a beacon for democracy."

Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that US encouragement may have made Saakashvili "miscalculate" and send Georgian troops into South Ossetia.

"I think in many respects Saakashvili got too close to the United States and the United States got too close to Saakashvili," Kupchan told the Reuters news agency.

"It made him overreach, it made him feel at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble."

US backing

The statistics seem to back the view that Tbilisi felt itself under the protective wing of the Bush administration.

US and Georgian leaders have forged a close relationship

As well as diplomatic encouragement, Saakashvili's government was offered both economic and military aid by Washington.

US special forces trained Georgian troops in 2002 to combat Chechen fighters in the Pankisi Gorge, which borders Chechnya, as part of the US "war on terror".

And Georgian forces continued to recieve training from the US as they prepared to send troops to Iraq, following the US-led invasion in 2003.

Washington gave $151 million to the Georgian government in security aid between 2004 and 2006.

Tbilisi has also benefited from the Millenium Challenge Corporation, a Bush administration programme intended to reward countries for "effective governance".

The corporation has signed agreements totaling $295 million, making Georgia the fourth-biggest recipient of funds.

Energy needs

The US may have welcomed Georgia as its key ally in the old Soviet Union's sphere of influence.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline runs through Georgia, allowing the US access to oil and gas supplies not pumped through Russia to the north or Iran to the south.

"Underlying all this is a larger, more significant contest: a geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West over the export of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas," Michael Klare, the author of Resource Wars told the New American Media website.

"The United States seeks to use Georgia as an 'energy corridor' to transport Caspian energy to the West without going through Iran or Russia; to this end, it helped build the BTC pipeline across Georgia and helped beef up the Georgian military to protect it.

Kosovo connection

Other's believe that while Georgia have miscalculated the level of support it had from Washington, the US has also erred in thinking it could influence events so close to Russian borders.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the old Soviet Union, said the US had made a "serious blunder" by allying itself so closely with Georgia.

"By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its 'national interest,' the United States made a serious blunder," Gorbachev said in an opinion piece to be published in the Washington Post US newspaper on Tuesday.

Other analysts say that US diplomats may have underestimated the level of anger the US recognition of Kosovo created in Moscow, leaving it fearful that Georgia would assert itself further in South Ossetia.

"The Kremlin made abundantly clear that it would view Kosovo's independence without Serbian consent and a UN Security Council mandate as a precedent for the two Georgian de facto independent enclaves," Dimitri Simes, the president of the Nixon Centre, wrote in a post on the Washington Note blog.

"Furthermore, while president Saakashvili was making obvious his ambition to reconquer Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow was both publicly and privately warning that Georgia's use of force to re-establish control of the two regions would meet a tough Russian reaction, including, if needed, air strikes against Georgia proper."

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