Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?

by Robert Scheer

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and
that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival
from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S.
presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy
Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who
ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became
Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy
adviser.

Previously, 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.

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess
the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is
every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin
is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American
militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

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.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which
Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military,
and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the
old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a “revanchist Russia” that should
once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular
elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is
always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.

How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian
troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori they would have
found a museum still honoring the local boy, who made good by seizing
control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly
dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday.

It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial
designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the
United States, which championed Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, now is
ignoring Georgia’s invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.

For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann’s neoconservative line of
demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election
campaign is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly
irresponsible.