This Old Soldier Never Learns

The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like the 10 French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the imminent government nationalization of much of the U.S. mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

There you have it — in a capsule, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational melange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is bankrupted by out-of-control military spending?

The economy is in a downward spiral, the national debt is at an all-time high, the dollar is an international disgrace, and inflation in July had the steepest rise in 27 years, driven by oil prices fivefold higher than when President Bush invaded the nation with the world's second-largest petroleum reserves.

While Mideast oil-rich nations we protect refuse to fully open the oil spigots as payback for our military efforts, McCain celebrates Gen. David Petraeus as his No. 1 hero for "victory" in Iraq. Aside from the reality that victory there is now defined as returning to the level of stability provided by Saddam Hussein, whom the Bush administration admits had nothing to do with the Osama bin Laden-led terrorists, even that goal requires the cooperation of our former sworn enemies, Iran's ayatollahs.

Presumably McCain envisions a more favorable outcome for Georgia, to whom he has committed the unqualified support of the United States with his outrageously overreaching statement that "we are all Georgians." If Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had been in contact with the leader of a nation before and after that nation provoked a war, his campaign would be in a shambles. Not so McCain, who is acting as if he is already the elected commander in chief of a reconstituted neoconservative-dominated White House. By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been reduced to a blustering bystander.

That military victory in Iraq and any other trouble spot is the key selling point of the McCain campaign is odd, because McCain's credentials derive from participation in a war that resulted in the most ignominious defeat in U.S. history. How else to think of the sacrifice of almost 59,000 Americans and 3.4 million Indochinese in a war that even McCain has long since not seriously tried to defend? Surely McCain accepted the notion that a Communist Party-run Vietnam was compatible with U.S. security interests when he, along with Sen. John Kerry, led the fight for recognition of Vietnam.

Wouldn't it have been grand if McCain, who made his own pilgrimage of reconciliation to Hanoi, would draw the proper lesson from that sad chapter in American history — that victory isn't everything it's cracked up to be? Or by extension, the recent Olympic festivities in still-red China, where Bush was photographed quite happily near portraits of the once-dreaded Chairman Mao, whom U.S. propaganda had long described, quite erroneously, as chief sponsor of the Vietnamese communists?

We are reminded of how brilliant Republican Richard Nixon was in rejecting the neoconservative addiction to the Cold War that McCain embraces when the late president traveled to Beijing to make peace with the bloodiest communist dictator of all. It turns out that the various communist movements were nationalist above all else, and when we "lost" in Vietnam, the result was not attacks on the United States but a war between China and Vietnam.

The lesson McCain should have learned is that the world is a complex place, today's enemies may be tomorrow's negotiating partners — as Barack Obama has at times dared to suggest — and that the neoconservative view of a Pax Americana is a dangerous fantasy. And a costly one at that — not only in lost lives and blowback from the regions we destabilize, but also in the dollars that American taxpayers must waste.

Thanks to the absurdly misdirected war on terrorism that McCain so enthusiastically supports, we spend more annually in inflation-adjusted dollars on the military than in any time since World War II — even more than during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Vote for McCain, and forget about funding to solve the Social Security, Medicare and subprime mortgage disasters or anything else that truly would make America stronger.

Things are getting a little worse for us. Yesterday, my father-in-law lost his job as a sound-system installation specialist. It's what has been helping pay the bills for as long as I can recall.

Already, Keith's getting mad that Rochelle (my sister-in-law) is forced to live with them; and now he has to deal with everyone in question.

So...the idea that we could live with them temporarily--until I can get a fix on our credit situation is a bust.

NOT SURPRISING. If you think about it.

Every idea that I've tried thus far hasn't always panned out. And it's not from a lack of trying either.

For the time being, we're just running out the clock.

I was wrong on what dinged us the most on our credit checks:

It *wasn't* our student loans. But the small amount of bills that we owe which went to collections.

Roughly $500 worth. Like I told someone I know today: "Even if I had the money TODAY, it would take 3 to 6 months for the debts to clear."

Stocks dropped today on financials and worries that either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac may suffer the same fate as WorldComm or Enron.

It's raining today--which isn't surprising. So I better bring in my plants.

Edited by author 08-18-2008 05:09 PM
BROKE AND BROKEN IN AMERICA

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Coming home after working abroad for a couple of months means looking at mountains -- of mail. But a lot of it is from banks offering credit cards and from politicians offering salvation, both for a price. You can throw that stuff out without opening any of it.

This time, the letter on top was from Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, the former Socialist mayor turned Independent in Washington. I had never seen anything from him before -- he's a pretty marginalized guy -- so I opened it. "Letters From Vermont and America" was the title of a 15-page booklet with excerpts of 600 letters from constituents answering an e-mail query Sanders sent out asking about their daily lives.

You are probably not going to like this column -- I hated reading the letters -- or think that I'm just talking about a bunch of bums. But some of the things people talk about here, including losing their homes, have happened within my own family. Some of the letters are from very (and sometimes suddenly) poor people, including men talking about living in basements to stay warm or burning the dining room furniture for fuel in February in the northland.

But most are from ordinary people who worked hard all their lives, played by the rules, sent their kids off to college -- and are now broke or being broken in America.

The things people mention most often are, predictably, gasoline and fuel oil costs, health care and property taxes. Here are a couple of samples:

"Yesterday I paid our latest home heating fuel delivery: $1,100. I also paid my $2,000-plus credit card balance, which bought gas and groceries for the month. As we approach the traditional retirement age, we are slowly paying off our daughter's college tuition loan and trying to keep our heads above water. ... Please don't use my name. I live in a small town and this is so embarrassing."

"I am so frightened ... I spent this winter with my heat turned down to 53 degrees. I am a teacher and have my master's degree. Everything is going up except my salary, which next year will go up slightly above 1 percent. ... The middle class is no longer the middle class. I've slipped into the lower class after a winter of double heating costs and now these new economic hits."

"I am a registered school nurse and my husband is a self-employed bread baker. We are in our mid-30s and have two young children. We always thought if we went to college, earned four-year degrees and worked hard, we would be able to live a decent life. ... We both work very, very hard to provide needed services to our Vermont communities. Yet we scratch our heads when trying to budget our income. How can it be that two college-educated individuals with respectable careers are in such a financial bind?"

"My husband and I followed all the rules. He grew up in urban projects and went into the military service in Vietnam so he could get GI Bill benefits and go to college. I grew up picking strawberries as a migrant worker, but I was able to go to college on scholarships. ... It doesn't seem right that after working hard and following all the rules for our lives, now, at 60, we're tumbling down."

All those writers are making between $40,000 and $55,000 a year. All talked about the danger of being wiped out by the coming winter.

Other letters are from people in worse shape:

"I am thankful that my employer understands that many of us cannot afford to drive to work five days a week. Instead, I work three 15-hour days ... keeping the heat at home just high enough to keep the pipes from bursting. The bedrooms are not heated and stay at 30 degrees. ... And I still can't keep up."

"We eat cereal and toast for dinner some nights because that is all I have."

"My parents, both in their 60s, are back to work so they can make ends meet and struggle to get enough gas money to see their doctors. They are opting to close their house up for the winter and stay with my uncle so they don't have to put oil in the furnace. ... Meanwhile, my mortgage is behind, and we are at risk for foreclosure ..."

Many letters ended like these three:

"What has this country come to?" ...

"Does anyone in Washington care?" ...

"Please help us."

McCain, Circa 2003

The Nation -- There's yet to be a solid, point-by-point effort to expose John McCain's pre-2003 views on Iraq, when (along with his neocon advisers and cheerleaders) he led the charge to Baghdad. Barack Obama, so concerned about how to end the war in Iraq, seems to have forgotten the importance of questioning how it began, especially McCain's pernicious role.

In today's Times, under the headline "Broad Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of a McCain Doctrine," appears a sketchy but useful reminder of McCain's pre-2003 irrational exuberance for war. (As a broader piece on McCain's so-called "doctrine," the article falls flat. There are better pieces on that score, including two authored by yours truly for The Nation, one published in 1999 and the second earlier this year.)

Here's the lede of the Times piece, showing McCain in full jingoistic, damn-the-torpedos mode:

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. "This is war," he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

"There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked," Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. "It isn't just Afghanistan," he added, on MSNBC. "I don't think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared," he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. "Very obviously Iraq is the first country," he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: "Next up, Baghdad!"

As the Times notes, "While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall." It adds:

He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi's opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein's supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

McCain had adopted the neocon doctrine of rogue-state rollback, and he hammered away at that after 9/11 arguing that the United States should go on the offensive as a warning to any other country that might condone such an attack. "These networks are well-embedded in some of these countries," Mr. McCain said on Sept. 12, listing Iraq, Iran and Syria as potential targets of United States pressure. "We're going to have to prove to them that we are very serious, and the price that they will pay will not only be for punishment but also deterrence."

So much for McCain's good judgment. It's wrong even to imply that McCain's disjointed thoughts amount to a doctrine, unless that doctine is: "Kill them all!" The Times also references McCain's near-psychotic readiness to blame Iraq even for the 2001 anthrax attacks, concerning which he said on TV: "Some of this anthrax may -- and I emphasize may -- have come from Iraq."

Falling oil prices present mixed blessing for consumers

The falling price of oil is prompting sighs of relief in many quarters. Cheaper gasoline and heating oil will make it easier for hard-pressed consumers to make ends meet. And the more than $30 a barrel that oil has dropped in recent weeks has been like a stimulus package for a battered economy.

But oil's abrupt decline is also a cause for concern. It could give companies and governments pause before making the investments in new energy sources, mass transit and efficient technologies needed to lessen the USA's dependence on foreign oil. It might also prompt some consumers to return to their old wasteful habits.

For two decades, Congress and a succession of presidents have opted against anything that could be called meaningful energy policy. Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama have embraced worthwhile ideas, but their tendency to trade panders on gas-tax holidays and windfall profits taxes is a worrying signal that neither would change the fundamental stalemate.

This leaves high oil prices as the most effective means of altering behavior. Last week, the Transportation and Energy departments reported just how influential they can be.

Americans cut out 12 billion miles of driving in June, a 4.7% drop from June 2007. During the first half of this year, Americans reduced their oil consumption by 800,000 barrels per day as compared with the first half of 2007. That reduction is in the range of estimates for what might come out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it were to be opened to drilling. It is also the biggest drop in 26 years.

High gas prices have prompted automakers to shift to more efficient cars and new technologies. Toyota's Prius hybrid has been a runaway success. And General Motors has been pouring resources into its Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid expected in about 2010 that will run entirely on electricity for drivers going less than 40 miles per day.

Wind and solar energy are becoming more competitive as the result of advancing technology and the fact that prices have risen for coal and other traditional sources of electricity. And Americans are turning to public transit in record numbers.

These changes are much more dramatic than anything resulting from proposals borne of political expedience. To be sure, high prices cause hardships, and the worst could come this winter from painfully high home heating oil prices; Congress and the president should look hard at increasing funds to help the poorest through a tough winter. But if oil prices continue falling, much of the recent momentum could be slowed, to the delight of those who profit from feeding the nation's addiction.

Spent the weekend updating my blogs and transplanting some beans and corn into larger pots.

I'm going to do more packing today. April did what she could for the main bedroom, but we still have a lot more to go--and lots more boxes to get. (Which is a plus--because Wal-Mart is the 24-7 shipper/boxing containers/getters. :0) )

The only problem is that we ran out of tape finally, so we aren't going to get much done between now and the end of the month. I'm going to pack what I can from the office--but outside of that...? I'm also in a wait-and-see mode.

Stocks flatlined today on financial concerns that the government may still yet have to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. This pisses me off because there is no 'rescue plan' for people like myself whom RENT.

How about turning some of that money towards people whom rent? Why not give THEM some relief from the high costs of rent by dumping excess monies into programs that can help alleviate the high costs of renting?

But...the government never thinks about the PEOPLE. Just Big Business and Corporate America. They have to be kept afloat so that they can continue to screw us in the ass again--years down the road.

Makes me wonder what happened to the American Dream: Affordable housing, a nice job, setting your goals for the future...?

Now...it's just your basic primeval fight for *survival*.

I chuckled when I saw how Rice was CONFIDENT that NATO will reign in Russia over its recent invasion of Georgia and South Ossetia.

Ooh-kay...how is NATO going to reign in Russia when it can't even fight its way out of Afghanistan?

Silly black rabbit...Trix are for kids! lol

Brain Dead Bureaucrat Watch: VA Blocks Voter Registration at Vets' Hospitals

When it comes to making profoundly stupid bureaucratic decisions, the Department of Veterans Affairs is often in a class by itself. When VA bureaucrats aren't losing laptops with millions of veterans' personal data or forgetting to include Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in their budget calculations, they are giving themselves obscene raises. For all the hard working doctors and nurses in VA hospitals and clinics across the country, it's a real shame that some top level VA officials are dragging the VA name through the mud.

Today we have one more bureaucratic blunder to add to the list. The VA has banned voter registration at veterans' nursing homes and homeless shelters. The irony is almost too great. Disabled veterans, who have made such tremendous sacrifices in defense of democracy, are now being denied assistance in voting.

The VA is claiming that voter registration drives are partisan, and would interfere with the functioning of their facilities. But hundreds of nonpartisan organizations regularly participate in voter registration drives -everyone from the League of Women Voters to the Elks Club. Helping people vote is a civic duty, not a partisan activity.

And if voter registration drives interfere with an institution's functioning, someone should tell the Texas Hospital Association and the American Medical Student Association, both of whom run voter registration campaigns at hospitals and clinics. The "Rx: Vote Campaign," run by the National Physicians Alliance, argues:

"Without exercising the right to vote, patients and those who care for them lack the power to improve the health of their communities. As a result, patients' health, and the health of our democracy, suffer. The nation's community health centers, clinics, and hospitals have a unique ability and responsibility to empower patients to participate in the democratic process."

If doctors believe voter registration drives can and should be happening at their hospitals, why can't the VA accept voter registration at their facilities?

The VA doesn't have a leg to stand on morally or legally. But if the VA refuses to budge, Congress will have to act quickly to overrule the VA, before veterans start missing their states' voter registration deadlines.

It should not take an act of Congress for the VA to admit they made a mistake. But until they do, hospitalized veterans like Martin O'Nieal, "a 92-year-old man who lost a leg while fighting the Nazis in the mountains of Northern Italy," will have to struggle to exercise the very rights they helped defend on the field of battle.

How can you help protect the voting rights of our veterans? Keep an eye on IAVA.org. In the meantime, make sure that you are registered to vote. It only takes a second.

Edited by author 08-16-2008 12:00 AM
My INR has stabilized to 2.9. Which is GOOD--because it's been so high for the past few months.

As a reminder, I'll be passing out my new mailing address when we leave in the next six weeks. This will be for those of you who wish to stay in contact.

I'm going to try and see if I can get THE STARCHILD finished, but there's no guarantee that I can get it published.

Not right off the bat anyways.

Edited by author 08-15-2008 11:58 PM
Still nothing from the ALJ this week. I wouldn't be surprised if the final decision on my disability came next month or several months after we become homeless.

The chances of us staying here has decreased in the past few days. The one-bedroom units are being snapped up here at an alarming pace and so we're not *sure* if we will be able to get one by the time our lease is up.

And of course, this also has a lot to do with what housing gives us for a new voucher.

If our cap is raised, we could plead our case to housing and ask them to let us stay here for just another year. Of course, we'll most likely have to transfer to another 2-bedroom unit; because this place needs to be seriously renovated.

Outside of that? There isn't any hope for us to find a new place to stay. Since our credit checks have come back negative (and we haven't heard anything back from Oxford Squares yet on why we were rejected), that puts us in the bullseye to become homeless automatically.

The rental market is cyclical, but this 30% increase in our rents couldn't have come at a bad time. Until the foreclosure crisis eases and then reverses itself--April and I are looking at 4-5 years of being out of house and home...AT THE MINIMUM.

Because it'll take the housing market until 2010 or 2011 to correct itself (not 2009 as Greenspan keeps guesstimating), and then following that...? Another 2-3 years for rents to start dropping back to normal levels.

But I'm not entirely sure, because a lot has to do with the outcome of the Presidential elections. If Obama's elected, we could see a faster recovery. But if McCain is CHOSEN...?

We can forget it. Because McCain isn't going to care about people like me or my wife. We're not high up on their "rich and powerful" radar to be of any consequence--and as a subsequent casualty, the poor and the middle-class will be once again left out in the cold to fend for themselves.

If you think things are bad now with energy and food prices...? We haven't *seen* the tip of the financial iceberg yet.

This nation is fast approaching a point of no return. Too many people have been left to struggle and fend for themselves because of the GOP's incompetence and at the mercy of Corporate America's greed.

Why do you think I've started to grow a garden? It's not because I *want* to. But because I have to start looking at ALTERNATIVES in order to survive on what little we get in foodstamps each month.

And even that's not lasting very long. Right now, we have less than $7 left on our card. We started out with $300 on the 9th.

SIX DAYS AGO.

That's all it took to go through that much in foodstamps. And only 14% of it was spent on 3 bags of chips (Tim's Cascade Potato Chips: Lightly Salted and Wasabi), 3 dark chocolate bars, and 10 bags of sunflower seeds for our own personal enjoyment--which should last us a month.

Why?

BECAUSE OF COSTS.

Everything costs so *much*. The rest we got was soy milk, 2 boxes of cereal, some orange juice, ice cream bars, bread, cheese, pizza, and a few other essentials. (Pancake mix and powdered milk among other things.)

No soda, no junkfood that you would understand it as, but we got some personal vices of our own. (As shown above.)

But neither the GOP's or McCain's supporters would UNDERSTAND the personal struggles that my wife and I are going through right now. They are too busy kissing up to the rich and powerful--while letting the rest of us suffer in anguish.

And some of it we brought upon ourselves. But the fact is, a lot of it can't be controlled by each of us individually.

I live by the stroke of luck mandate. Sometimes, I'll get lucky, others...? I'll get my ass kicked clear across the universe--and be forced to start back or start over from scratch.

But I'm mostly dependent on a corrupt government that doesn't care if I live or die. And presently, they're doing all they can to kill me *off*.

But for some unexplained reason, I just won't go away. I keep coming back as a glaring reminder of my innate ability to survive and I keep needling these selfish fucks each and every chance I *get*.

"Just because you're rich and powerful--it doesn't mean I have to be treated like this. I'm a person too!"

I may not have the connections or the resources needed to influence every sitting representative or senator in our corrupt body of government (like Fannie Mae did recently--when they spent $22M to influence Congress), but I can certainly make their lives a living hell--by reminding each and every one of them that people like ME still has a role to play in the greater scheme of things.

Hotter than snot today. 86-92 degrees in Everett.

There's a *slim* chance that we might be able to stay here after all--but we won't know for another week. Housing got some new paperwork from us, but the truth is...we are running against the clock here.

There isn't much we can do BUT wait.

And pack up what we can until I can get some more tape.

Edited by author 08-14-2008 03:10 PM
It's going to be hot for the next few days (as the NW experiences another mini "heat-wave"), so I've watered my small garden.

My wife gave me $5 so that I can go get some more planting soil. But the beans and the corn need to be transplanted over the course of the coming week.

I'm trying to delay things just a little bit--so that I can stretch things out to the next month. Because I'm going to need more pots and soil.

Yeah, I'm on the verge of becoming homeless, but I'm still thinking about gardening and growing vegetables. :0)

Say It Ain't Jew, Joe

Ever since their diaspora, Jews have been accused of putting something else -- themselves, the dispersed Israelite people, then Israel itself -- ahead of their own country. Jewish citizens of Russia, Germany and America, to pick just a few, have been slandered (and sometimes killed) for allegedly putting their allegiances to the Hebrew nation ahead of their patriotism toward the motherland, the fatherland or the homeland. This is vintage Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And yet what do we hear today from Orthodox Jew Joe Lieberman?

"In my opinion, the choice could not be more clear: between one candidate, John McCain, who's had experience, been tested in war and tried in peace, another candidate who has not. Between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not."

And just in case the media failed to notice, the McCain campaign -- whose slogans include "Country First" -- has now sent Lieberman's remarks to the entire political press corps.

What is to be made of this? Does Joe Lieberman not realize that he is using one of the oldest anti-semitic tricks in the book to accuse Obama of being the Islamic candidate?

Awash in oil money, it's time for Iraq to pay its own way

If the U.S. government's budget were in the same shape as Iraq's, American taxpayers would be wondering what to do with a budget surplus of about $1.4 trillion.

Wouldn't that be nice.

Instead, thanks in part to the $10 billion it spends every month in Iraq, the U.S. government is projecting a deficit of almost $400 billion this year. Meanwhile, Iraq is in budget heaven, awash with oil money. Until it passed a new spending plan last week, Iraq's government was on track to run up a surplus of as much as $50 billion this year, or roughly half its revenue, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The GAO report details how a nation that desperately needs electricity, water, housing and other infrastructure is sitting on money it won't or can't spend. Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers have funded the vast majority of Iraq's reconstruction. This can't continue.

With its infrastructure in tatters and Iraqis in desperate need of basics such as electricity, why isn't the Iraqi government spending much more of its oil wealth to rebuild the country? Iraqi and U.S. officials say that the Iraqis don't have the financial expertise yet to spend their money, that anti-corruption procedures make the process cumbersome, that the war made rebuilding perilous, etc. Perhaps. But these are weak excuses in view of how much the lack of progress in Iraqis' daily lives undercuts the U.S. effort there.

Although Bush administration officials promise that the U.S. is handing over reconstruction to the Iraqis, inconvenient evidence to the contrary seems to keep popping up. For example, Congress recently appropriated $5.3 billion for reconstruction this year and next. And the U.S. is spending $33 million on development projects at the Baghdad airport, including work on a three-star hotel the Iraqis will own, according to Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John Warner, R-Va.

Levin, Warner and other members of Congress should keep the heat on the administration to justify every new penny in U.S. spending. They can also press the Iraqis to use some of their oil money to ease the U.S. burden — by taking over payments to the thousands of former Sunni insurgents now siding with the U.S., for example, or lowering American forces' fuel bills, or maybe even reimbursing the United States for money Americans spend on rebuilding from here on.

If the question is who's better able to afford it, the answer seems pretty plain.

Georgia War Is a Neocon Election Ploy

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, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. 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. Iraq invasion.

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 Mikhail Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which clearly was expected to produce a Russian counter-reaction. 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 Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Hussein 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 Sen. 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 McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But it will provide the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, 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 ramps up its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Joseph 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 their 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 is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible.