Bush sends U.S. troops to Georgia to deliver humanitarian aid

From Robert Scheer, Truthdig, a few minutes ago via Truthout

   Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

   Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

   Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

   There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.

   In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

   Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

   Moscow – With the fragile truce in Georgia on the brink of collapse Wednesday, President Bush announced that the United States had begun a humanitarian aid mission there and said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would go to the region to work for a settlement of the conflict with Russia.

…

   With Mr. Bush’s announcement, the United States signaled its most active involvement in a long-simmering border conflict between Georgia and Russia that flared into open fighting last week. The conflict escalated precipitously into a cold- war-style standoff between Russia and the West.

   The United States, Mr. Bush said, “stands with the democratically elected government of Georgia and insists that its sovereignty and territorial integrity be respected.” He said a transport plane was already on its way to Georgia, carrying medical supplies and a contingent of Army and Navy forces to carry out an aid mission.

   The Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, hailed the decision as a “turning point,” but also immediately cast the American presence in military terms.

   “What I expected specifically from America was to secure our airport and to secure our seaports,” he said, in a telephone interview minutes after Mr. Bush spoke. “The main thing now is that the Georgian Tbilisi airport will be permanently under control.”