| Let's consider the Russia-Georgia in the context of presidential politics for a moment, shall we?
The big news is that a prominent foreign policy advisor for the McCain campaign, Randy Scheunemann, was a lobbyist for Georgia. Apparently, not only did he receive hundreds of thousands from the republic, he may have been in part responsible for giving that country's government advice that led to the invasion of South Ossetia, the flashpoint for the current conflict with Russia. Scheunemann - a former member of the Project for the North American Century, the "think" tank that brought us the Iraq war - urged Georgian inclusion in NATO, among other acts that seem to have been intended to provoke Russia.
Josh Marshall:
Scheunemann's 'policy' was to get the Georgians ginned up on the idea that we were their close military allies and that we'd come to their rescue if their brinksmanship with the Russians went bad. Well, that didn't work out very well. Any situation where you start the shooting and then find yourself begging for a ceasefire within 48 hours is a major blunder. He's not an 'expert' on Georgia; he's the lead guy on the policy that got us into this situation. And the fact that John McCain would make him his chief policy advisor after he's been the conductor on so many trainwrecks should tell us all we need to know about Sen. McCain's foreign policy judgment.
McCain seems to be taking his cues on the Georgian conflict and making provocative statements against Russian, egging our country on to another Cold War. |
Again, Josh Marshall:
McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.
In fact, McCain's message on Georgia got so pointed, that even Georgia president, Mikheil Saakashvili, got annoyed:
"Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, 'We are all Georgians now,'" Saakashvili said on CNN's American Morning. "Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it's time to pass from this. From words to deeds."
But best of all is the rhetoric McCain uses to express his outrage.
From a WSJ editorial today: "For anyone who thinks that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wakeup call."
From a press conference, yesterday: "In the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations."
Um...oops. And you wonder why the U.S. had no diplomatic leverage in this conflict.
Now all of this "manly" neocon posturing could be election grandstanding, plain and simple. H*ll, what does gramps have to lose, anyway? That kind of he-man tough talk made editorialists across the country wet their pants last time, didn't it?
On the other hand, we could be seeing McCain's view of foreign policy in action. Usually McCain's age is not supposed to be an issue in this election, lest we appear "ageist" or what-have-you. But maybe what we're seeing is a 72-year-old who's framing contemporary politics in terms that became irrelevant nearly 20 years ago, because that's an era he understands. |
