McCain's Intelligence

While this Mother Jones article raises several disturbing issues, for me the worst is the connection between McCain's main foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, and Ahmed Chalabi. This article says that Scheunemann was one of Chalabi's acolytes, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld among others, in his effort to get the US to invade Iraq. Chalabi wanted to replace Saddam Hussein, but ran into too much opposition. He has remained a central figure in the new Iraq, although usually just below the public appearance level. The last I saw he was the head of rebuilding Baghdad, a job that gives him lots of money to siphon off to his Swiss bank accounts.

This MJ article sheds some light on my concern that there may be some truth to the Russian allegations that Bush and the Republicans encouraged Georgia to invade South Ossetia in order to help John McCain's campaign. McCain apparently shares my view that there is no love lost between the CIA and President Bush, and perhaps by extension other Republicans, including McCain. Thus, I think it's unlikely that there would have been an official CIA operation encouraging Georgia to invade. I'm less sanguine about the military, and the MJ article says that's where McCain wants to shift intelligence responsibilities. That would certainly reinforce suspicions that if there were some kind of clandestine effort to foment a war in Georgia to help McCain, the effort would have been led by the US military, not the CIA.

I doubt that the US did anything official to foment war in Georgia, but Scheunemann's connection to Chalabi makes him even sleazier than I thought he was before. He may well have done something to stir things up through his unofficial contacts with Georgians. It also helps explain McCain's rabid stance in favor of the Iraq war. If looks like if you vote for McCain, you're also buying Scheunemann and all his lobbying clients.

Putin Says Bush Pushed Georgia To Attack for McCain

Putin obliquely accused Bush of encouraging or helping Georgia attack South Ossetia in order to help John McCain get elected, according to a CNN interview reported in the NYT. I was already worried in an earlier blog that McCain had helped foment the war in Georgia.

Putin seemed to imply that an American military or CIA officer was directly involved. I doubt this. If a CIA officer was involved, it was probably some rogue agent like those who worked in the Watergate break-in, not one working in a CIA operation. I think there is no love lost between the CIA and Bush. Bush has made the CIA's failures the scapegoat for his failure on 9/11, and by reorganizing the intelligence community has weakened the CIA significantly. It's unlikely that the career leadership of the CIA would undertake an operation mainly to support McCain's candidacy. It's also unlikely that SecDef Gates would risk starting a war for partisan politics, although I'm not so sure about some of the wild men in the special forces command; I just don't know enough about them.

Although I'm dubious that the US government would have encouraged Georgia to start a war to help McCain, I think the USG probably encouraged Georgia to tweak Russia's nose for its own foreign policy reasons, however stupid they may be. And I think that McCain used is own foreign policy contacts to encourage Georgia to be aggressive, particularly his chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Schuenemann, who is a lobbyist for Georgia. He basically gets paid to foment a war that advances McCain's campaign. McCain's connections are obvious; he and Saakashvili claim to talk several times a day, with Schuenemann's lobbying firm picking up a little commission every time they do. Plus, McCain has sent his own envoys to buck up Georgia's aggressiveness -- Sen. Graham, Sen. Lieberman, and his wife, Cindy McCain. No doubt they all said something like, "Don't give up," but the questions is how far they went in promising military aid either now or after "President McCain" is elected.