Return to the Cold War for John McCain

They obviously don't teach Cold War history at the law schools at Columbia University in New York or George Washington in the nation's capital, otherwise Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, who attended both institutions, would have thought twice about encouragement from the US for his ill-fated attack on South Ossetia a week ago.

Saakashvili could have read vivid accounts of broadcasts, via the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe, encouraging the Hungarians in 1956 to believe that if they rose against the Soviet occupier Nato troops would race to their aid. The CIA's director of operations, Frank Wisner, fervently hoped for intervention, but President Eisenhower never had the slightest intention of providing it. Wisner was devastated and suffered a breakdown, ultimately committing suicide.

Another lesson for Saakashvili from this period of savage Cold War tension came in the dawn of the Kennedy administration when Cuban exiles, seeking to topple Castro in the Bay of Pigs landing, waited vainly for US air support which they thought the CIA had guaranteed. Kennedy declined to make such an order and the furious exiles claimed they had been stabbed in the back. Some think they took revenge with the assassination of JFK nearly three years later.

There are well-known Americans with an identifiable motive for encouraging Saakashvili to believe that his onslaught on South Ossetia would receive support more substantial than some pro forma quacks of protest from George Bush, dragging his eyes from the comely swimmers and beach volleyball players in Beijing to the anodyne text placed in font of him by his advisors.

Republican contender John McCain needs bare-knuckle confrontations with America's enemies. In such eyeball-to-eyeball crises he can strut before the cameras as the seasoned  warrior with 'experience', unafraid to lead America to the very brink of nuclear Armageddon. Ever since Harry Truman in 1948, it's been a reliable way of getting elected as President.
 
McCain's chief foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has until recently worn two hats, acting as McCain's lead foreign policy man and also as a lobbyist for Georgia. Filings by the McCain campaign and reports to the US Department of Commerce show that between January 1, 2007 and May 15, 2008 the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 and, across the same period, the government of Georgia paid Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, $290,000 in lobbying fees. Scheuneman has since quit the lobbying firm, a two-man operation.
 
So Scheunemann indubitably had the ears of both Saakashvili and of McCain. What advice he tendered his patrons is a matter of speculation, but any advisor to McCain would certainly regard a vintage Cold War era confrontation between the United States and Russia as potentially a huge plus for the Republican candidate. He certainly seized the opportunity for manly bluster about Russia’s conduct.
 
Also on McCain's team are various members of the Brzezinski clan, headed by Zbigniew, a veteran Cold Warrior from the Carter presidency of the 1970s. Brzezinski has publicly boasted of his role, as President Carter’s foreign policy adviser, in luring the Russians into their ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. A year later the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

Brzezinski, a Pole, is fanatically anti-Russian and has been thundering on the TV talk shows about the era of darkness that will descend on mankind if Russia is permitted to put Georgia in its place.

Barack Obama, whose initial public comments were relatively demure, has also felt it necessary to ratchet up his rhetoric, dutifully pinning the Hitler label on Putin. Nonetheless, his foreign policy team has instructed the press that McCain is a Cold War zealot, perfectly capable of blowing up the planet.

So is the electorate ready to be pushed into McCain's column on the grounds that he can stand up to the Russians? It could happen. As noted above, no politician here ever lost a race by overplaying his determination to face down supposed threats to national security. President Saakashvili is goading McCain to put his money where his mouth is and McCain is well on his way towards re-fighting the Cold War. Let's see how that plays with the electorate in October.  

For the moment, a big slice of the US electorate is glued to the TV, watching the Olympics. Their mind is not on Russia, but on China. They couldn't care less about Georgia or South Ossetia. As for the Bush administration, it is too late to be playing some complicated piece of poker along Brzezinskian lines. Back in May, so Ha'aretz is now reporting, the US specifically warned Israel not to attack Iran and denied that country weapons and equipment it might use for such an enterprise. Bush doesn't want to go out in a blaze of guns. ·