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.

Russia, Neo-Cons and Jews

Chrystia Freeland writes in the Financial Times today that Russia needs the neo-cons, because it needs someone to help fight for its liberty, but that the neo-cons have been reigned in by their failures in Iraq. Then she goes on to say, "Most damaging [in Russia] was the creation of the oligarchs - an act based partly on an extreme, Chicago-school-inspired faith in the power of private ownership, no matter who the owner was or how the property was acquired." What she doesn't say is that most of the neo-cons were Jews, and that most of the Russian oligarchs were Jews. Furthermore, many of the neo-cons came out of the University of Chicago, where they studied politics under Leo Strauss, rather than economics under Milton Friedman. I think it's a good thing for the US and Russia that the neo-cons' wings have been clipped. Democracy is in much better shape in Europe than in America, where George Bush is following some sort of Stalinist model embracing torture, restrictions on civil liberties, and other un-American attacks on the Constitution; let Europe help the Russians.

Rice Mismanages Relationship with Russia

Despite Robert Gates' protestation in Munich that "One cold war is quite enough," we seem on the verge of a second one. Gates' remarked were prompted by Putin's speech in Munich, including statements such as, "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force - military force - in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts." And "We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law."

So how did Condi Rice let us get into this mess? She made her career, academically and politically, as an expert on the Soviet Union. If there is one relationship she should be able to manage, it's the one with Russia. Yet, we stay silent while Russia is straying far from the democratic ideals we once saw taking root there, and it wins international sympathy when it accuses the US of failing to respect international law. What's wrong with this picture?

When Bush looked into Putin's heart and saw a good man, did he consult Condi? I think Condi, based on her study of the old Soviet Union, looks at Putin and sees another Stalin or Brezhnev. These divergent view have produced stalemate, while the Pentagon coasting along on orders from its old boss, Rumsfeld, is planning anti-ballistic missile (ABM) sites in Poland and Czech. Interestingly, one of Bush's first affronts to international law was his decision to unilaterally leave the ABM treaty. A better man would have proposed to renegotiate it, not just dump it. The ABM treaty was intended to avoid the very problems now straining the US-Russian relationship. Do something, Condi!

For a different take, but one which doesn't really blame anybody much, see this Washington Post column by Fred Hiatt.