As Russia goes to war, McCain camp sees benefit

It really is fascinating to watch McCain attempt to gain political advantage from every world event as he grasps for the presidency. Here, he seeks to make Obama's response to the Russia/Georgia crisis an issue, ignoring the fact that he is the one out of sorts with the norm.

“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.”

I have pointed out before that McCain is actually way out of line with not only Obama's position, but that of the White House, the European Union, NATO and a series of European powers.

And you'll note in the video above that McCain constantly refers to "Russian aggression", totally ignoring the fact that, in this instance, it was Georgia who was the aggressor.

Of course, apart from blaming the Russians for the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia McCain has actually no concrete proposal to stop the Russians, although he does bizarrely want to kick Russia out of the G8.

Democrats are hitting back against this populist knee jerk nonsense.

“I believe what Sen. McCain is proposing is totally, totally wrong,” said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), who appeared on the same show. “Keeping them out of the G8? Russia is a major superpower. We have to build the kind of relationship with Russia so that we can deal with them on restraining Iran from building nuclear weapons, so that we can deal with Russia in the Middle East, help us in the situation in Iraq.”

Richardson added: “Sen. McCain wants to isolate Russia further. That’s not going to work. That will make Russia more detrimental in the relationship with the United States.”

An Obama spokesman also pointed out that previous lobbying work for Georgia by McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann has given off the “appearance of a conflict of interest.”

“John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser lobbied for, and has a vested interest in, the Republic of Georgia, and McCain has mirrored the position advocated by the government,” Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan told The New York Times.

And the Obama camp are right to point out the conflict of interest which Randy Scheunemann finds himself in:

At various times from 2001 through early this year, Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia paid Scheunemann and his partner, Mike Mitchell, more than $2 million. Much of Scheunemann's work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann's clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him.

That's about as clear a conflict of interest as one could find. And the McCain camp have paid an extraordinary amount of attention to Scheunemann's former client, Georgia, a country of only four million people.

In his statement last month on the inauguration of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, McCain said he hoped the new president would "take steps to ease tensions with Georgia by reversing recently announced measures that undermine Georgia's internationally recognized sovereignty which have rightly caused great concern among our European allies."

McCain might take his hard line on Russia because it plays well with some of the GOP base. Experts on Russia say some of those Republicans harbor nostalgia for being tough on the Soviet Union. Or perhaps he simply believes Russia will respond best to threats. But there is little doubt that McCain's rhetoric and policies would please the countries Scheunemann has worked for.

"Those are countries whose advantage it is to point the finger at a Russian threat, particularly Georgia," explained Thomas Simons, ambassador to Poland under George H.W. Bush and to Pakistan under Bill Clinton.

There is no way to tell if Scheunemann has influenced his boss on behalf of his clients, or if McCain and Scheunemann simply share a common get-tough-on-Russia philosophy. But when there are lobbyists on a candidate's campaign staff, it's hard to distinguish chicken from egg when it comes to policy.

McCain may well be speaking from the heart when he puts himself out on a limb like this for Georgia, but when one of your staff has been paid such a large amount of money to represent a country, and when your policy exactly mirrors that of the government who have paid a member of your staff such sums, then the Obama camp are right to say that "a conflict of interest" exists.

McCain is giving it a lot of bravado, but he is short of actual advice as to how one can stop the Russians from taking Georgia if they are in the mood to do so. And they appear to be in such a mood. So, unless McCain is actually proposing war against Russia, then he's simply spouting hot air whilst trying to convince people that he actually has a plan.

UPDATE:

Balloon Juice have the best take on this I've read so far:

Saakashvili thought he was a player in the game, when really he was just the ball.

UPDATE II:

Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating interview with Professor Charles King of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He certainly gives the impression that the damage the Georgians have inflicted on South Ossetia is far worse than the media are leading us to believe.

If you look at Georgian actions just late last week, in the initial attack on South Ossetia, we're talking about a country that did use - Georgia - did use large-scale bombardment of a city that it claims as its own. The capital of South Ossetia has been virtually flattened because of the fighting there and a fair amount of the responsibility for that lies with Georgia. So this I think it's very simplistic to see this as the Russian autocratic bear trying to snuff out this small, beacon of democracy. There are bigger issues, geopolitical issues, human rights issues, that are at stake here as well.

Click here to listen to the interview.

UPDATE III:

Dear God, it's a rare day when I agree with anything that Bruce Anderson says, but today he's on the money:

Georgia would like to join Nato, for obvious if naive reasons. Most Georgians have persuaded themselves that if they were Nato members, we would defend our freedoms shoulder to shoulder with theirs, on the Georgian-Russian frontier. That is nonsense. The moment Nato extended guarantees to Georgia or the Ukraine would be the moment Nato either ceased to exist as a credible defensive alliance or - more likely - turned into an organised hypocrisy. It would become a two-tier structure, in which new members were invited to contribute troops but not offered protection when they most needed it.

The neo-cons are treating Nato as if it is a club, rather than what it is. It is a serious commitment to defend a member if attacked. What's the point in courting Georgia for membership if we are not prepared to defend them?

Click here for Anderson's article: The West Must Share the Blame for war in Georgia.

UPDATE IV:

Matthew Yglesias quotes from Fred Kaplan highlighting that it is exactly this kind of right wing bluster that caused Saakashvili to make his foolish blunder in the first place.

It’s heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue.

It’s infuriating because it’s clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

As stupid as Saakashvili was to to what he did, it is still heartbreaking to see what is being done to ordinary Georgians and to the people of South Ossetia. Saakashvili's mistake was to listen to blowhards - there really is no other word to describe them - promising Georgia something which they could never deliver; military protection from Russia.

And they are bloviating still. McCain, Cheney, Kristol are all still giving it the large one about what they will and will not find acceptable. And, apart from loud mouthed, utterly empty rhetoric, what are they really going to do about this? Nothing. Nothing at all.

The people of both Georgia and South Ossetia are real people suffering real hardship because of empty right wing rhetoric. And, even as the Russians stomp around Georgia, these right wing assholes still can't stop blowing hot air and empty threats all over the place.

Are they really going to start WWIII over Georgia? No, of course they are not, which is why they should never have been making offers of Nato membership to Georgia in the first place.

Click title for full article.

Tags: McCain, Obama, US election 2008, Russia, South Ossetia