Patrick Buchanan, man of the right and scourge of the neo-cons, has written a new column that helps us to understand the McCain campaigns strong and aggressive reaction to the Russian incursion into Georgia. And the key to that understanding? McCains principal foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann.
In addition to being McCains foreign policy guru Scheunemann is the principal of Orion Stategies, a lobbying and consulting group that has as its client the nation of Georgia. The payments to Orion from Georgia (at the same time Scheunemann was working for McCain) totaled $290,000. From the Buchanan piece:
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.
Scheunemann has other foreign clients as well. Buchanan has identified those clients in his column, and detailed the riches garnered for representing foreign interests in Washington.
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.
The result of his lobbying for the government of Latvia?
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 has a long history of promoting the U.S. into needless foreign entanglements. Lets look at that history to see where a McCain foreign policy team would take us.
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.
Some pretty unsound judgements and associations by the neocons man to McCain. And what does conservative Pat Buchanan think? His indictment of the neocons is searing.
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?
Buchanan is a polemecist of the first order, and he finishes with a flourish.
“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.
If this is indicative of the prospective McCain foreign policy maybe Bush 43 was only the opening act. Read the Buchanan column here.
Bill Manzi.com 