(Updates with additional U.S. officials) By Jonathan Wright WASHINGTON, Nov 26 (Reuters) - The United States contributed to a peaceful transition of power in the former Soviet republic of Georgia this week by taking the opposition seriously and financing civil society programs for the past eight or nine years, senior U.S. officials said on Wednesday. "Everything the United States can do, we did do and we did it right," said one official, who asked not to be named. Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, a long-standing U.S. ally, resigned on Sunday after supporters of the opposition protested the official results of parliamentary elections held on Nov. 2. On Wednesday, U.S. President George W. Bush told Georgia's interim President Nino Burdzhanadze he would send a delegation to study ways other countries can support reforms following Shevardnadze's departure, but made no specific aid promises. U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said Bush, in a 10-minute phone call from his Texas ranch, told Burdzhanadze the United States supported "Georgia's program of democratic and free-market reforms." Burdzhanadze, the speaker of parliament, took over as interim president; another leader, American-educated lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili, was nominated as sole opposition candidate in presidential elections next year. Saakashvili studied in the United States in the 1990s on a scholarship under the Freedom Support Act, named after former U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine. Another State Department official said Saakashvili "was a Muskie. We did a lot of exchange program work with the Georgians and he got a law degree from Columbia University (in New York). This is one of the products of one of our programs." Burdzhanadze has also been the beneficiary of U.S. programs. Several years ago she visited NATO headquarters in Brussels as part of a group financed by the United States, an official said. Zurab Zhvaniya, the third member of the opposition triumvirate, was on a "voluntary visitor program" in the United States in 1997. Under the program, the State Department organizes meetings with prominent Americans. When Burdzhanadze visited Washington in June this year, she met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. "Ordinarily the speaker of parliament doesn't meet with the secretary of state and the national security adviser but she did -- just to make sure that the message was clear to President Shevardnadze that we considered these people to be completely credible," the official said. The political landscape in Georgia had changed radically since the mid-1990s, when the opposition was divided and short on credibility. The United States wanted Shevardnadze to know the parliamentary elections must be free and fair, the official added. The United States reinforced its message by sending former Secretary of State James Baker, who knew Shevardnadze when he was Soviet foreign minister. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili, who is of Georgian ancestry, and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona also went to see him. "Throughout, Ambassador Dick Miles was participating in a very aggressive way .... Our focus was on how to do a clean election," one of the officials said. The officials said the downfall of the old order in Georgia was its attempt to meddle with the election results when the opposition could check the outcome. "The work that had gone into that election ... was work that we had started eight or nine years ago," said one.
