How far the Republicans will go to win elections.

Putin states that Americans were involved Saakashvili's imbecilic invasion of South Ossetia. Indeed, he has come right out and said that they were doing so to help McCain get elected:

“The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US President.”

But I don't find this accusation surprising in the slightest.

The McCain camp's ties to Saakashvili and Georgia are well documented and the Republican party have always shown that they will go to any lengths to win elections, including stopping peace from breaking out during Vietnam in case it aided Humphrey and not Nixon prior to the 1968 election.

As the race entered its final weeks, their great fear was that President Johnson would negotiate a settlement to the Vietnam War and thus push Vice President Hubert Humphrey over the top to victory.

So, although a half million American soldiers were in the battle zone and the war was tearing the United States apart, Nixon's campaign made secret contacts with South Vietnamese leaders, allegedly offering the assurance that if they refused to cooperate with the Paris peace talks, they could expect a better deal from Nixon.

The evidence is now clear that the Nixon campaign dispatched Anna Chennault, a fiercely anti-communist Chinese-American, to carry that message to South Vietnamese president Nguyen van Thieu.

Journalist Seymour Hersh first described the initiative in his 1983 biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power. Hersh reported that U.S. intelligence "agencies had caught on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his people and President Thieu in Saigon. … The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris and prevent any show of progress."

So Nixon was literally prepared to allow young US soldiers to remain in a war zone if he though it might help him get elected.

And Reagan was no better. At the time George Bush, running to be Reagan's VP, worried that Carter might pull off an "October surprise" by managing to free captured American hostages, and there is now overwhelming evidence that the Reagan team contacted the Iranians.

Over the past 28 years, more than a score of witnesses - including senior Iranian officials, top French intelligence officers, U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives, the Russian government and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat - have confirmed the existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter's efforts to free the hostages.

In 1996, for instance, during a meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told former President Carter that senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1980 with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in the hostage release.

"You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections," Arafat told Carter. [Diplomatic History, Fall 1996]

Arafat's spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif said the GOP gambit pursued other channels, too. In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam indicated that Arafat learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the Iranians had made other arrangements for a delay in the hostage release.

"The offer [to Arafat] was, 'if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO'," Bassam said. "I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages."

And, they didn't simply try to ensure that American hostages were kept imprisoned, they issued threats to make sure that they were.

Bani-Sadr said a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to Casey and to Casey's business associate, John Shaheen.

Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: the Republicans were in league with pro-Republican elements of the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding Iran's help.

Bani-Sadr said the emissary "told me that if I do not accept this proposal they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals." The emissary added that the Republicans "have enormous influence in the CIA," Bani-Sadr wrote. "Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination."

So, the Republicans have a long history of interfering overseas in order to aid the election of Republican candidates, so it shouldn't really be a surprise - especially when one considers the close ties between the McCain camp and Saakashvili, and how much McCain benefited from the conflict in the polls - that there are people like myself who wonder why this happened at such a fortuitous time for John McCain.

There's actually nothing shocking about Putin's accusation, the Republicans have been pulling off this kind of shit for years.

Click title for Robert Parry's article.

Tags: Saakashvili, Putin, Bush, Cheney, McCain, Obama, US election 2008