McCain And His NeoCon Allies On The Warpath... Again

McCain & his supporters want to attack Russia?

The NeoCons are out in force today. I finished putting on my socks just as McCain started making his speech from Erie, PA on the Russian-Georgia conflict. I turned off the TV before he had finished shuffling his papers and tried collecting his thoughts. Today's Wall Street Journal features a mournful plea from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who had been encouraged by DC NeoCons to play a terminally weak hand against the Russians and is now up the creeks without the paddle. He claims he didn't chose war but he's either lying or delusional. He frames his pleas in the NeoCon propaganda all over the media:

Ostensibly, this war is about an unresolved separatist conflict. Yet in reality, it is a war about the independence and the future of Georgia. And above all, it is a war over the kind of Europe our children will live in. Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe.

Let's be even franker: Georgia, despite its desires, isn't in Europe. It is wedged between eastern (Asian) Turkey and Azerbaijan. Saakashvili claims Russia wants to crush his country because it has made great strides towards consolidating democracy (questionable), eradicating corruption (more questionable) and building an independent foreign policy (well, if "independent" means tied to American priorities, that at least is true). Although Georgia is thousands of miles from the Atlantic-- and has been, for good reasons, rejected for the NATO membership it hoped to gain by helping the U.S. occupy Iraq-- Saakashvili appeals to "our common trans-Atlantic values of liberty and democracy."

Give me a break. The values he holds in common are with hysterical NeoCon war criminals like Cheney, Bill Kristol, slimy Georgia lobbyist/McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, slimy Georgia lobbyist/McCain campaign advisor Randy Scheunemann, and Robert Kagan. Foolishly, Saakashvili, who, encouraged by the NeoCons, sent his forces in to attack South Ossetia on Thursday doesn't see how the war is his fault. "The Kremlin designed this war," he claims in the Journal. Over at the Washington Post Robert Kagan, one of the "inspirations" for the attack on Iraq is singing a similar tune: "This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time... Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world's third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move." So why did Kagan, Cheney and their friends goad Saakashvili on to attack?

As we mentioned the other day, this reminded me of Bush's father encouraging the Shi'a and Kurds to rise up against Saddam and then leaving them to their own miserable fates after they did. Russia isn't interested in having an American satellite with high tech American bases and weapons systems on it's southern border any more than the U.S. has ever been interested in having Russian bases in Cuba or Grenada or anywhere else near the U.S. mainland. Tenth rate little countries like Georgia-- and Grenada-- need, first and foremost, to learn to get along with the giant superpowers on their doorsteps. But for McCain and his camp, the war in Georgia is only one thing-- an opportunity to make irresponsible political hay and attack Obama. Obama has been careful to acknowledge that until January there is only one Commander in Chief, George Bush. McCain, on the other hand... is plum insane. Does he want to attack Russia and start a nuclear war?

“Today, many are dead and Georgia is in crisis, yet the Obama campaign has offered nothing more than cheap and petty political attacks that are echoed only by the Kremlin,” said McCain aide Tucker Bounds in the statement. “The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn’t merely raise questions about Sen. Obama’s judgment -- it answers them.”

Obama, the Bush Regime (minus Cheney) and the entire State Department are all on the same page. Only the hot-headed, calculating and blustering McCain camp is advocating escalating this into a conflict between the U.S. and Russia. I wonder what troops he proposes using.

The media keeps proclaiming that the Russia-Georgia conflict should tell us something about the two candidates. OK, it tells us that Obama understands the constitution and that whether we like it or not, Bush is still the president and makes foreign policy, not lobbyist driven campaigns supporting their clients. It also tells us that if we hate life and want civilization to end in a blaze of glory, John McCain is the right man to vote for.