McCain Salutes The Troops-- And The Rest Of Us

I'm hearing anecdotal evidence-- lots of it-- that Republican-leaning American servicemen in Iraq are mighty pissed about McCain's choice of pot-smokin' Little Miss Sunshine to be backup Commander-in-Chief. But then I read she's undergoing a crash course in all things foreign one day this week from Neocon lobbyist Randy Scheunemann. Ostensibly this is to prepare her for her debate with Joe Biden. It's far worse that it's also preparing her-- just in case many unlikelies happen-- to take over the running of U.S. foreign policy. You see, aside from being McCain's chief foreign policy advisor and a notoriously corrupt lobbyist-- most recently credited with encouraging Georgia to start a war with Russia that helped no one but Vladimir Putin and possibly McCain-- Scheunemann is also credited with being one of the 3 or 4 men most responsible for dragging the U.S. into attacking Iraq. He's the president of the treacherous, and probably treasonous, Neocon group the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was a major player in the shady neo-fascist conspiracy, Project for the New American Century. He is a very close associate of Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi and routinely sells access to top right-wing American officials like Cheney, McCain and Condoleeza Rice. And he's explaining the world outside of Wasilla to someone one heartbeat-- one very old heartbeat-- away from the presidency. The GOP has lost its mind to a pack of medievel religious fanatics.

John Kerry was on with George Stephanopoulos this morning who made the point that McCain's attempt at proving he's a maverick only shows, once again that he's dangerously erratic. Kerry:

With the choice of Governor Palin, it's now the third term of Bush-Cheney, because what he's done is he's chosen somebody who actually doesn't believe that climate change is manmade. He's chosen somebody who has zero-- zero-- experience in foreign policy.

The first threshold test of a president of a nominee in choosing a vice president is to prove to the American people that the person that you've chosen can fill in tomorrow, that they come with the requisite experience to lead the nation in foreign policy and in national security.

You know, she may be-- I mean, I'm sure she's a terrific person. I'm not attacking her. I think John McCain's judgment is once again put at issue, because he's chosen somebody who clearly does not meet the national security threshold, who is not ready to be president tomorrow.

...Do they think Clinton supporters supported Hillary only because she was a woman. For Heaven sakes, they supported Hillary because of all the things she's fought for, because she fights for health care, which John McCain doesn't support; she fights for children and children's health care, which John McCain voted against; she fights for a windfall profits tax on the oil company, which John McCain opposes.


I mean, for Heaven sakes, the people who supported Hillary Clinton are not going to be seduced just because John McCain has picked a woman. They're going to look at what she supports.

The fact that she doesn't even support the notion that climate change is manmade-- she's back there with the Flat Earth Caucus. And I don't see how those women are going to be fooled into believing-- I think it's almost insulting to the Hillary supporters that they believe they would support somebody who is against almost everything that they believe in.

American Foreign Policy Should Never Be For Sale To The Highest Bidder

I wanted to hurl when I saw that a member of Congress-- a Democratic member of Congress-- was able to corral enough freshmen Democrats (20) to help hard-core Republicans defeat a farm bill amendment offered by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) that would have made it easier for U.S. farmers to sell agricultural goods to Cuba. In all, sixty-six Democrats voted against it. How did that happen? Glad you asked.

The defeat was engineered by an extremely corrupt tag-team, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a far right Cuban-American Republican congresswoman from Miami-Dade, and her BBF, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the most corrupt Democrats in Congress, who took a great deal of money from right-wing sugar interests (which are against normalization of trade with sugar-producing Cuba for their own selfish reasons) and from an extremist anti-Castro PAC that normally only gives to Republicans. Ros-Lehtinen described Wasserman Schultz as "a tiger" in the battle against the amendment and she is generally blamed for its defeat. Wasserman Schultz has been building her power base inside the Democratic Party the old fashioned way-- she buys it. And she buys it by aggregating votes for special interests and directing tainted and very questionable PAC money to her colleagues, money from the US-Cuba Democracy PAC and money from her own extremely shady leadership PAC, the Democrats Win Seats PAC. Here's a list of the Democrats who crossed the aisle and voted against Rangel's amendment who were paid off by Wasserman Schultz. Next to their names is the amount of money she paid them; the second figure is the amount the US-Cuba Democracy PAC paid them. Many, though not all, are from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. The ones who aren't, are hanging out with a very bad bunch.

Jason Altmire (PA- $5,000/$8,000)
Mike Arcuri (NY- $2,000/$4,000)
John Barrow (GA- $4,000/$9,500)
Melissa Bean (IL- $5,000/$7,000)
Chris Carney (PA- $7,500/$7,000)
Joe Donnelly (IN- $5,000/$3,000)
Chet Edwards (TX- $2,000)
Brad Ellsworth (IN- $3,000/$3,000)
Gabby Giffords (AZ- $5,000/$5,000)
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY- $4,000/$8,000)
Phil Hare (IL- $1,000/$9,000)
Ron Klein (FL- $4,000/$10,000)
Tim Mahoney (FL- $7,500/$10,000)
Jim Marshall (GA- $1,000/$2,000)
Harry Mitchell (AZ- $4,000)
Patrick Murphy (PA- $4,000/$6,000)
Joe Sestak (PA- $2,000/$1,000)
Heath Shuler (NC- 5,000/$7,000)
Zach Space (OH- $2,000/$7,000)
Robert Wexler (FL- 2,000/$6,000)

[A side note here. Obviously this is a study of how Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her reactionary Big Money allies buy votes. Just to put it in some context, the US-Cuba Democracy PAC gives most of their bribes to Republicans. In fact, with the exception of Florida Democrats-- Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Ron Klein and Tim Mahoney-- and to Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (SC) and anti-Cuba fanatic Albio Sires (NJ), most of the really big money the PAC hands out has been to right-wing Republicans. In this batch, they also "donated" hefty $10,000 chunks to John Boehner (OH), John Cornyn (TX) and Mitch McConnell (KY).]

Perhaps you saw John McCain's Wall Street Journal editorial piece today-- written, no doubt, either by or with the guidance of Randy Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy advisor who happens to know a lot about Georgia, being a very well-paid lobbyist for that country. (He says he "stopped" lobbying a couple of months ago when he came on board the Double Talk Express but a few days ago the government of Georgia-- which has been getting a great deal of taxpayer dollars lately-- sent the lobbying firm that Scheunemann owns another $600,000.) Anyway, the Journal OpEd by McCain and Scheunemann is called We Are All Georgians. I'm certain if we were all paid as handsomely as Scheunemann by the Georgians we'd feel as passionately as he and the rest of the McCain camp does. They call the dust-up in the Caucasus "stark international aggression," but today's Guardian expresses a very different point of view. Referring to McCain, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, Seumas Milne writes that the problem in Georgia has more to do with American expansionism on Russia's border than with Russian imperialism.

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered." George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government." Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied-- along with Georgia, as luck would have it-- the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives?

...You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order"-- in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy." Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution." Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo-- whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia-- and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq-- hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defense secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

This morning's NY Times carries a story by Michael Cooper you are not likely to hear about on TV news, In Split Role, McCain Adviser Is Sometimes a Lobbyist. Yes-- Scheunemann, one of the true villains in this whole tragic episode, and one of the hundreds of corrupt lobbyists who infest the upper reaches of the McCain campaign. Right Web lays out his whole disgraceful history as one of the behind the scenes manipulators who tricked America into war with Iraq. A radical Neocon, he was the head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (which included McCain and Lieberman as co-chairs) and the director for the Neocon mothership, Project for the New American Century. Today's Times story doesn't dwell on this but instead goes into the interesting relationship between McCain, jailed GOP rainmaker/lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Scheunemann. Keep in mind that McCain's "investigation" of Abramoff was a complete whitewash aimed at inoculating crooked Republican politicians who were taking bribes from Abramoff, like Conrad Burns (R-MT), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR).

When Senator John McCain led a Senate investigation three years ago of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to fraud charges, Mr. Abramoff’s old firm turned to a former McCain campaign adviser for help.

The firm, Greenberg Traurig, which had quickly cut its ties to Mr. Abramoff, hired Randy Scheunemann, who had been the McCain campaign’s foreign policy adviser in 2000-- and is again this year-- for advice on handling the Senate investigation.

“After Greenberg Traurig severed ties to Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scheunemann advised the law firm on how best to cooperate with the Senate investigation,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. “The record reflects that the law firm cooperated.”

Mr. Rogers said he believed that Mr. Scheunemann was hired because he had worked in Congress for more than a decade and had experience with investigations, and not because of any ties he had to Mr. McCain. He added that Mr. Scheunemann had served the firm in an advisory role, and had never spoken with Mr. McCain about the issue.

Since the Russian invasion of Georgia, Mr. Scheunemann has drawn attention for his lobbying efforts on behalf of the Georgian government, for which he lobbied until March. Mr. McCain has been outspoken in his support of Georgia. During a flight on Tuesday on the McCain campaign plane, Mr. Scheunemann told reporters that Mr. McCain has known the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for more than a decade.

Craig Holman, the governmental affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, said Mr. Scheunemann’s dual role-- sometimes advising Mr. McCain as a candidate, and sometimes advising private clients on their interactions with him as a senator-- raised potential red flags. “This is a serious revolving door problem: a person who keeps fluctuating between being a lobbyist, and advising candidates,” Mr. Holman said.

...Last week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and an [unindicted] associate of Mr. Abramoff, had sent an e-mail message asking people to attend a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain next week. Mr. Abramoff had arranged for Mr. Reed to be paid several million dollars by Indian tribes that ran casinos to coordinate anti-gambling campaigns against competing casinos. McCain aides said Mr. Reed did not hold any position with the campaign and was not a host of the fund-raiser.

But it sure was... Christian of him to help McCain raise a bundle of dollars so he can continue running his full-time smear campaign against Barack Obama.

McCain's campaign is the most lobbyist driven campaign in the history of American politics. Everything is up for sale-- even foreign policy! Not even counting the money they get from foreign governments, McCain’s lobbyist bundlers, advisors and staff members have collected $930,949,819. That's a lot of money and people who pay it out expect something in return-- which is why Mikheil Saakashvili demanded that McCain go beyond just running his mouth and do something concrete to save his job.

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?

What's Going On In Georgia And How Dangerous A Game Is McCain Willing To Play With War & Peace?

For the last three days I've been trying to make heads or tails out of the situation in Georgia, not in the southern U.S.-- which is puzzling enough-- but in the small former Russian and Soviet province that is now a feisty independent republic, straddling the oil pipeline from the Caspian oil areas to the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea. Parisian Kos diarist, Jerome, knows more about this than almost anyone writing about it who I've found-- and far more than the superficial imbeciles at the NY Times, let alone CNN-- so I'd recommend his latest post at Daily Kos. Short version: see the map above-- oil pipelines is why Washington cares about this... plus an opportunity for some ritualistic anti-Russian moves. (Remember how well that worked out for us and the world in Afghanistan?) Today's Times, whoring itself out, as usual, as the mouthpiece for self-serving Insider opinion from DC, expressed shock that this could happen. It was entirely predictable.. if not entirely provoked by the naive armchair warriors who dragged this country into Iraq and are currently promoting a war with Iran. Jerome:

[O]ur claims to have the moral high ground are totally ridiculous and need to be fought, hard. This is not about democracy vs dictature, brave freedom lovers vs evil oppressors, but a nasty brawl by power-hungry figures on both sides, with large slices of corruption. The fact that this is turned into a cold-war-like conflict between good and evil is a domestic political play by some in Washington to reinforce their power and push certain policies that have little to do with Russia or Georgia. That needs to be understood.

The other place to turn for real information-- rather than Infotainment-- on the Confrontation in the Caucasus is the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, where Robert Farley is doing a stupendous job of putting the whole thing in context. I'm old enough to remember when investigative journalists worked for TV news departments so I appreciate Farley's commentary. He is less sympathetic to the Georgian case because he thinks that "escalating the war (and providing an excuse for Russian counter-escalation) was a damn stupid thing for Saakashvili to do, and a remarkably damn stupid thing for him to do absent an extremely compelling cause. Small, weak states living next to abrasive, unpredictable great powers need to be extremely careful about what they do; in most cases, their foreign policy should, first and foremost, be about avoiding war with the great power. This is what Saakashvili failed to do. The war didn't need to escalate; it was a Georgian decision to move from the village skirmishes that were happening on Tuesday to the siege of Tsikhinvali on Thursday."

But with the Russian Army so much bigger and more powerful than the U.S.-trained and equipped Georgian army, what did Saakashvili and his NeoCon allies in Washington have in mind?

[T]he war will not be fought between the full Russian and the full Georgian militaries; rather, it will be fought between the Georgian and whatever forces the Russians can get to South Ossetia and keep supplied there. And that may have been the crux of Georgian strategy. As Doug Muir notes, there is only one road between Russia and South Ossetia, and no substantial airfields. Doug:

There was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

It looks right now as if that strategy has failed. The Russians seem to have been able to deploy a substantial armored force in South Ossetia, and also seem to control the sky. Of course, we don't know what things will look like tomorrow, but right now they don't look good for Georgian efforts to close the road. And if the Georgians can't close the road, they are in very serious trouble. Indeed, even if they do close the road they might be in trouble; the other way that the Russians might get into South Ossetia is to go through Georgia. That would be an escalation, but the Russians might be tempted by their overwhelming theater superiority, and by the stakes.

The NeoCon miscalculation is that politically Putin and Medvedev can't afford to lose this war. Period. So they won't-- even if they have to obliterate Georgia. (The role of the NeoCons in this kind of reminds me of what Bush's father did to the Shi'a and the Kurds after the First Gulf war. He irresponsibly and uncaringly urged them to rise up against Saddam-- and then he did virtually nothing to prevent the inevitable slaughter that followed-- unless you count his clueless son's murder of Saddam and his family and destruction of his country justifiable payback.)

Moreover, it's not just the downside of defeat that will drive Russian behavior; the Russians really want to win because they will see serious gains from victory. Putin will likely be able to dispense with the Prime Minister nonsense after pounding Georgia to dust, because the Russians will elect him God King, or at least "discover" that he's actually the heir to the Romanov throne. The Ledeen Doctrine works much better for Russia than for the United States, because people understand that Russia really doesn't care; she will destroy you without troubling her conscience about democracy. Russia gets to demonstrate her power, solve two of the Frozen Conflicts (the Georgians are never getting Abkhazia back if Russia wins here), and humiliate the United States, all at the same time. They hit the trifecta if they win this war.

The sooner NeoCons are driven out of Washington, the better for the whole world. It is worth noting that McCain's response to the conflict has been to immediately look to use it for political domestic gain and to adopt the NeoCon position entirely, one that has been pushed by one of the top lobbyists McCain has scarfing up money for him, potential war criminal Randy Scheunemann,a paid employee of the Georgian government. While Obama, NATO, the European Union and even Bush are taking a balanced position, McCain sounds like he'd like to expand this into a conflict between the U.S. and Russia. He's out of his fucking mind and a truly dangerous little jerk who no one should take seriously as a candidate for anything except a comfy retirement home.