I Wonder If There Are Some McCain Supporters Thinking The Tsar's Tanks Are Approaching Atlanta And Have Devastated Macon

Saakashvili wants action. The victorious Russians want the truculent Georgian to resign-- although virtually all Georgian leaders share his nationalistic, anti-Russian fervor-- and Saakashvili seems to think McCain is going to growl and someone is going to care. One of the well-paid Georgian lobbyists on McCain's staff fed him a ridiculous and hyperbolic line: "We are all Georgians now." Unless he was just talking about the lobbyist and Neocon crowd that goaded Saakashvili into attacking South Ossetia last Thursday, McCain is on his own planet. But the Georgian president is clinging to McCain's phrase like a piece of floating driftwood after his rowboat overturned in shark infested water.

“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.”

It's hard to believe-- well, not too hard-- that foreign governments hire top McCain staffers and part of the deal is that McCain beats the war drums for them. Is this even legal?

It's the regular folks in Georgia who are paying the price-- heavy price-- for the little political games being played by McCain and the Neocons in Washington. McCain would rather see tens of thousands of Georgians die and the entire region destabilized than lose the election. McCain and his shills were hoping to win the election by persuading enough low-info voters that Obama is the anti-Christ. That isn't working and McCain still can't break out of the 30's in the opinion polls. So Bob Sheer, whose new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America is very complimentary towards McCain, thinks McCain's camp might have actually provoked the war to help McCain's sagging campaign! He points the finger directly at Neocon war criminal/lobbyist/McCain chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann.

Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate's foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime it was Putin's Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

...McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

Stanford Provost Condi Rice was first hired by George I as a kind of combination baby-sitter and remedial tutor for his political heir, whose entire previous knowledge of foreign affairs was ascertained in a Mexico whore house in Nuevo Laredo. She didn't have much to work with but she taught him some foreign policy basics-- "Israel good," "Iraq bad," things like that. And as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State... well, no one from the right or left would tell you she's been more than mediocre-- and most would be less generous in their assessment. But, after all, the big foreign policy problems during her tenure were far afield from her area of expertise: the Soviet Union. So now that the Neocons have drummed up a new crisis in a Cold War with the Russians (heir to the Soviets), it is time for Condi to shine. The far right Wall Street Journal editorial page, basically a GOP propaganda too, describes the response to the Georgian crisis by "the Bush Administration" (i.e., Condi in this case) as stumbling. "So far the Administration has been missing in action, to put it mildly."

President Bush finally condemned Russia's actions on Monday after a weekend of Olympics tourism in Beijing while Georgia burned. Meanwhile, the State Department dispatched a mid-level official to Tbilisi, and unnamed Administration officials carped to the press that Washington had warned Georgia not to provoke Moscow. That's hardly a show of solidarity with a Eurasian democracy that has supported the U.S. in Iraq with 2,000 troops.

Compared to this August U.S. lethargy, the French look like Winston Churchill. In Moscow yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, acting as president of the European Union, got Russia to agree to a provisional cease-fire that could return both parties' troops to their positions before the conflict started. His next stop was Tbilisi, on the heels of a visit from Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Barely concealing it loathing for Rice, the WSJ favors "expelling Russia from the G-8 group of democracies, as John McCain has suggested" and maybe "barring Russia's long desired entry into the World Trade Organization," even threatening to take away the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi! "A country that starts a war on the weekend the Beijing Olympics began doesn't deserve such an honor," they thunder-- before moving on to their main point:

Reshaping U.S. policy toward Russia will take longer than the months between now and January 20, when a new President takes office. But Mr. Bush can at least atone for his earlier misjudgments about Mr. Putin and steer policy in a new direction that his successor would have to deal with. If that successor is Barack Obama, this is an opportunity to shape a crucial foreign policy issue for a novice who could very well go in the wrong direction.

The alternative is ending Mr. Bush's tenure on a Carter-esque note of weakness. To paraphrase General Clay: Whether for good or bad, how the U.S. responds to Russia's aggression in Georgia has become a symbol of American credibility. By trying to Finlandize if not destroy Georgia, Moscow is sending a message that, in its part of the world, being close to Washington can be fatal. If Mr. Bush doesn't revisit his Russian failures, the rout of Georgia will stand as the embarrassing coda to his Presidency.

I think the train that's carrying the coda to this particular presidency has long left the station. Saakasvili says "my people feel let down by the West." Maybe he should have listened to Secretary of State Rice when she warned him last month not to provoke Russia, rather than to his own lobbyists playing a dual game whose purpose is not to protect Georgia but to make sure McCain and the GOP aren't wiped out in November. Condi's back on her way to Tbilisi. No sweets and flowers waiting for her.

McCain is sending his two top lieutenants, Holy Joe Lieberman (R-CT) and inveterate rug shopper and closet queen, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to represent his campaign in Tbilisi. Obama still recognizes George Bush as president of the United States and is keeping his supporters behind the official U.S. policy line in the delicate situation, rather than exploiting it to gin up votes. McCain is so utterly unfit for office that if the GOP was smart, they would dump him in the Mississippi River and pick a random person off the street in St. Paul to run. Obama on the Georgia situation today:

"I welcome President Bush's decision to send aid to the people of Georgia, and Americans stand united in support of the men and women who will carry out this humanitarian mission. As soon as possible, we must follow this aid with broader reconstruction assistance,
including emergency economic loans, to help the people of Georgia rebuild their lives and their economy.

The situation is still unstable, and Russia must back up its commitment to stop its violence and violation of Georgia's sovereignty with actions-- not just words. The United States should now join our European partners in direct, high-level diplomacy with both Georgia and Russia to seek  immediate implementation of a cease-fire, and to achieve a lasting resolution to this crisis. There must be independent monitors to verify the implementation of this cease-fire, and Russia must not use this moment to consolidate a position that violates Georgia's territorial integrity, or to violate the human rights of the people of Georgia.

As we move forward, the United States and Europe must review our multilateral and bilateral arrangements with Russia in light of its actions. The loss of life over the last few days has been tragic, and there are no winners in this conflict. Now we must rededicate ourselves to achieving a lasting peace in the  region."

McCain, worrying that he might be coming off as a bit of a warmonger again: "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations." Good to know. Does that mean we give Iraq and Afghanistan back? Are we back to Pax Americana yet?