Russia

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

The crisis over Georgia has abated, but its ramifications will only increase. What of Ukraine? The question worries people across Europe and especially those in Ukraine.

When the Soviet Union broke up, thousands of nuclear weapons remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. One of America’s principal foreign policy goals became disarming these inadvertent nuclear weapons states.

Washington has become an ugly place. Eight years of bitter Republican attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton have been followed by eight years of bitter Democratic attacks on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But this venom cannot compare to the tidal wave of political hatred that has recently overwhelmed Ukraine’s capital of Kiev.

The crisis over Georgia has abated, but its ramifications will only increase. People across Europe are worrying, What of Ukraine? At this moment the denuclearization of Ukraine looks like a shortsighted nod to foreign-policy correctness, putting mostly theoretical nonproliferation concerns ahead of very real international security interests.

"This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it."
- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Aug. 14, 2008

Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The remarks by Zalmay Khalilzad, America's UN ambassador, denouncing Russian aggression against that paragon of democratic virtue, the Republic of Georgia, are almost too funny to quote. U.S. government hypocrisy obviously is not new, but Washington's inconsistency on this occasion is more spectacular than usual.

Today the United States and its European allies should be pleased that the country of Georgia is not a member of NATO, as desired by President George W. Bush. If so, we might be preparing for war with Russia.

Bill Kristol’s op ed “Will Russia Get Away With It?” in today’s The New York Times is a beauty even by his admittedly low standards. Our corrupt thugs in Tbilisi are apparently being bullied by an ”autocratic aggressor” from Moscow and we can’t let the bad guys get away with it, particularly as the brave Georgians have been bribed and bullied into sharing our imperial mission in Iraq, which is, by the way, on the “verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists.”

Bill also manages to mention Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas (murderers); Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (either a dictator aggressor or a fanatic depending on how one reads the following sentence); Iran (messianic) and, lest one think that his argument is not serious, Nazi Germany. I thought Bill would avoid citing Hitler, but he managed to squeeze him in in the next-to-last sentence. China also gets some of the Bill Kristol treatment, and it’s not pretty.

Brave little Georgia, which started the fighting by sending troops into Ossetia, is beginning to sound like brave little Belgium before it was raped by the Kaiser’s army in 1914. Predictably, John McCain, whose principal foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann was a lobbyist for Georgia, has jumped on board the neocon bandwagon.

As Pat Buchanan warned, the expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia has produced a predictable and completely avoidable reaction from Moscow. If Georgia were a full member of NATO right now, which thank God it is not, the US would be facing the Russians over Tbilisi’s determination to control two breakaway enclaves that are inhabited mostly by Russians.

Reports that Russia has moved SS21 medium range missiles close to the front armed with tactical nuclear weapons have been hard to find in the US media. The Russian General Staff believes that it can only offset the huge advantage that the US and NATO have in precision guided weapons by using battlefield nukes if attacked by western forces. Is this really a quarrel that Bill Kristol and his buddies want us to get into?

Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Philip Giraldi
From American Conservative Magazine blog