The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
AlterNet
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
Posted on August 13, 2008, Printed on August 13, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/94929/
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.
Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Pornography of Power: How
Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.
© 2008 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/94929/
