Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the neocons aren't after you

Tom Hayden makes what I believe is his debut appearance at TPM Cafe asking Was Georgia a Neo-Con Conspiracy? A Lesson for Obama 11/10/08.

McCain's top foreign policy advisor in his blessedly unsuccessful Presidential campaign, Randy Scheunemann, is a leading figure in a set of circumstances that certainly deserves more investigation. Scheunemann in his role as a lobbyist was a registered foreign agent of the Georgian government from 2004-8. There's nothing wrong with being a "registered foreign agent". Lobbyists doing work for foreign government are required by law to make such a registration and it doesn't imply anything illegitimate.

Hayden looks at the circumstantial evidence suggesting that Scheunemann and McCain could have at least had some advance warning of Georgia's initiation of hostilities against Russian forces in South Ossetia, which started the August conflict:

Now that Georgia's August 7 operation appears to have been pre-planned and deliberate, is it possible to believe that Scheunemann was unaware of a scenario that closely matched the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident? Before this becomes yesterday's news, someone should ask what did he know and when did he know it? Did the US advisers to the Georgian military know and not report the facts? In the unlikely event that they were uninformed and uninvolved, the McCain team was quick to exploit the moment to attack Obama for inexperienced wobbling.

I do think this is worth further investigation by the press (if they can organize themselves for it), by Congress and/or by the incoming Obama administration.

But I would stress that looking for individual connections that may be tenuous or unprovable can easily distract from policy issues. And we can certainly conclude from what is already in the public record that the Cheney-Bush administration with its aggressive push to get Georgia into NATO, including the training of Georgian armed forces for that purpose, were at best careless in sending signals to Georgia that they could interpret as US backing for an attack.

Not unlike ambiguous US signals that the Old Man Bush administration sent to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime before he attacked Kuwait in 1990. Back when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense. (I'm just saying!)

Hayden's observations about the hawkish reaction of the Obama campaign to the Georgia-Russia conflict are certainly worthwhile:

There followed a complete acquiescence by the Democrats, led by Obama's national security advisers, whose Cold War conditioning apparently trumped their own experience of being manipulated into the Iraq war. Or was a political decision made that Obama could not afford to appear weaker than McCain on Russia? A reignited Cold War would have been fused with the War on Terrorism in one dominant paradigm.

And Hayden is right to take the attitudes of McCain and the neocons toward Russia as a signal of what to expect in their upcoming efforts to start new wars, discredit the Obama administration and keep the defense budget at absurdly elevated levels:

Now that they are in opposition, there is little doubt that the neo-conservatives will continue their strategy of confrontation on the Russian border. These are people who deliberately exaggerated the Soviet military threat in the Reagan years, developed the Project for the New American Century [where Scheunemann was a director], fabricated evidence about Saddam's arsenal, and seemingly have never stopped. They could destroy an Obama presidency by demanding expenditures for multiple wars which America cannot win and cannot afford, or alternatively accusing him of weakening America in the world.

The important cautionary lesson for Obama is that his initial instincts favoring diplomacy were correct while his national security advisers failed him. ...

Vice president Joe Biden famously warned that Barack Obama would be tested over national security policy in the first months of his tenure. That the testing may come from within the national security establishment, not only from foreign sources, should give Obama pause as he contemplates the time ahead.[my emphasis]

Paranoid? As Hayden reminds us, the Bay of Pigs fiasco did happen back in John Kennedy's first weeks in office.

Tags: georgia, russia, tom hayden