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McCain's Neocon Warmonger
And none dare call it treason.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
22/08/08 'WND" -- - 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.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to
get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for
client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid
Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his
Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the
Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.
What were Mikheil's marching orders to Tbilisi's man in
Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America
committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.
Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West
Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to
protect Scheunemann's client, who launched this idiotic war the
night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves
out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a
classic corruption of American democracy.
U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is
what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should
Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back
into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South
Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?
Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on
display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years
to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going
to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no
U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.
That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality – namely,
that Russia's control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and
occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the
United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with
Russia.
If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain,
Barack Obama, Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing
committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia
into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have
already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.
Not only did Scheunemann's two-man lobbying firm receive
$730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was
paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June
1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end
of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been
moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the
Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.
The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian
citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts
and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of
protector of Russians left behind in the "near abroad" when the
Soviet Union broke apart.
Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has
been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia
intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the
United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians
out.
This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed
our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes
that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as
a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.
Scheunemann's resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He
signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to
President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9/11. He
signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11,
threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war
against Iraq. He was executive director of the "Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq," a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi
and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.
The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on
Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same
discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of
George Bush?
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence ... a free
people ought to be constantly awake," Washington warned in his
Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the
Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to
deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call
it treason.
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