Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Uncomfortable coincidences

Robert Scheer on the McCain campaign's neoconservative, anti-Russian hard-line, and a close campaign advisor's connections to the Saakashvili regime in Georgia.

US policy toward Russia and Georgia helped to set the stage for this war, and McCain and his obnoxious pals are happy to exploit this tragedy for their own ends. Would a President McCain lead us unnecessarily into a new Cold War? Robert Scheer :

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.

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