I am becoming quite worried about McCain.

RockRichard at VetVoice says bluntly:

Forget about Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and REAL Al-Qaeda. That isn’t a major conflict. Let’s not dwell too much on figuring out this Iraq problem. It isn’t an international crisis. And maybe he was just having a “senior moment” and completely forgot about the Gulf War, apartheid, and genocide in Darfur, Rwanda and the Balkans.

If you are reading this and are currently deployed or about to deploy which at the current OPTEMPO should include anyone who is active duty, keep that chin up. Its not like this is a crisis or anything. And if you’re a loved one of someone who made the ultimate sacrifice, remember that Senator McCain seems to think that your loved one died for something so trivial that it doesn’t even break the “crisis” threshold.

Andrew Sullivan asks:

What if Obama had said this?…. It’s this kind of emotional hyperbole that should worry people about McCain in the White House. He’s a drama queen on these issues. With a finger on the trigger.

Michael Stickings writes:

[McCain is] providing yet more evidence — and it’s really piling up — that he is not the straight-talking maverick with international relations expertise…but a dim-witted buffoon who actually knows very little about the world and who is prepared to do and say anything to score political points….

Let’s face it, McCain has no clue what to do about the conflict in Georgia. His message, however, is this: “It’s the Cold War all over again! I was there! I get it! Russia is the Evil Empire! I know what to do! Vote for me!”

And this is what really bothers me.

McCain is exploiting an extremely serious situation that will affect US and Russian relations for years to come in order to score political points. And they called Barack Obama “presumptuous”? Consider this (from The Washington Post):

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he talks to McCain, a personal friend, several times a day. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia’s government. McCain also announced this week that two of his closest allies, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would travel to Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi on his behalf, after a similar journey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The extent of McCain’s involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin. (WaPo)

Obama made a speech and shook hands with a couple of people. He also apparently stirred up the Iraqis and got all that discussion going about withdrawal deadlines. He was criticized for meddling in foreign policy.

But this is several notches further up the meddling scale. My colleague remarked:

John McCain says he is speaking on the phone every day to Georgia’s President…. Doesn’t Bush mind?….. I’d mind. For once I kind of admire Bush’s restraint.

I’d be like, “Dude? Excuse me; I believe I am still the president here?”

For all the Cold War comparisons I’m seeing, the situation in Georgia involves other factors (such as the argument of the separatist enclaves within Georgia and the matter of the Georgian president’s initial attack on South Ossetia). Nobody’s hands are completely clean with respect to the factors which initiated the conflict. A nuanced response is needed in dealing with Georgia’s territorial integrity and with the people within its borders. The bad blood goes back hundreds of years.

On August 11, The Christian Science Monitor published an article by Professor Charles King of Georgetown University. (Professor King is professor of international affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University…and the author of “The Ghost of Freedom: A History of The Caucasus.”) He wrote:

Russia illegally attacked Georgia and imperiled a small and feeble neighbor. But by dispatching his own ill-prepared military to resolve a secessionist dispute by force, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has managed to lead his country down the path of a disastrous and ultimately self-defeating war….

[T]his is not a repeat of the Soviet Union’s aggressive behavior of the last century. So far at least, Russia’s aims have been clear: to oust Georgian forces from the territory of South Ossetia, one of two secessionist enclaves in Georgia, and to chasten a Saakashvili government that Russia perceives as hot-headed and unpredictable.Regardless of the conflict’s origins, the West must continue to act diplomatically to push Georgia and Russia back to the pre-attacks status quo. The United States should make it clear that Saakashvili has seriously miscalculated the meaning of his partnership with Washington, and that Georgia and Russia must step back before they do irreparable damage to their relations with the US, NATO, and the European Union.

The attack on South Ossetia, along with Russia’s inexcusable reaction, have pushed both sides down the road toward all-out war – a war that could ignite a host of other territorial and ethnic disputes in the Caucasus as a whole. (CSM)

He also wrote:

Like the Balkans in the 1990s, the central problems of this region are about the dark politics of ethnic revival and territorial struggle. The region is home to scores of brewing border disputes and dreams of nationalist homelands….

Farther afield, other secessionist entities and recognized governments in neighboring countries – from Nagorno-Karabakh to Chechnya – are eyeing the situation. The outcome of the Russo-Georgian struggle will determine whether these other disputes move toward peace or once again produce the barbaric warfare and streams of refugees that defined the Caucasus more than a decade ago.

For Georgia, this war has been a disastrous miscalculation. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are now completely lost. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario under which these places – home to perhaps 200,000 people – would ever consent to coming back into a Georgian state they perceive as an aggressor. (CSM)

Calling out Russia for its inexcusable opportunism (and previous meddling in the separatist movements with the exact intention of stirring up this sort of trouble) or even—if it is possible—punishing them for it is not going to solve Georgia’s internal problems. The separatist enclaves have not been under Georgia’s control since the Nineties. Rightly or wrongly, they do not acknowledge Georgia’s sovereignty over them or their territories.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford has reported: “Many Ossetians I met both in Tskhinvali and in the main refugee camp in Russia are furious about what has happened to their city.

“They are very clear who they blame: Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili, who sent troops to re-take control of this breakaway region.”

Human Rights Watch concluded after an on-the-ground inspection: “Witness accounts and the timing of the damage would point to Georgian fire accounting for much of the damage described [in Tskhinvali].” (BBC News)

The Bush administration is working with the EU to resolve the situation. Bush has told the Russians to get out now.

McCain needs to let them get on with it. But will McCain, who seems, as Sullivan says, to be caught up in the drama, who claims close friendship with the Georgian president, and who said “We are all Georgians,” simply exacerbate the situation? On August 13, The New York Times wrote:

Despite Western governments’ public statements of support for Saakashvili, some Western diplomats now privately say that the Georgian leadership or military made a serious and possibly criminal mistake last week by launching a massive barrage against the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, which inevitably led to major civilian deaths and casualties.

Russian officials have said 2,000 people were killed in the Georgian offensive, a figure that has not been confirmed independently. But it is indisputable that large numbers of civilians were killed in and around Tskhinvali. (Reuters)

What I’d really like to see is for McCain to disengage from any actual meddling at this juncture. He should step away from the phone and recall his two envoys.

I’m sure McCain means well. But in a situation like this, good intentions count for very little.

At Obsidian Wings, Dr. Hilzoy says:

Like the neocons surrounding him, McCain’s worldview was forged in the fires of the Cold War. To him, foreign policy is essentially about nation-states, some of which are evil, some of which are good. In McCain’s eyes, there’s always an imperialist existential threat threatening to expand and gobble up the world. Yesterday it was communism. Today it’s “Islamofascism.” Tomorrow, probably China.

In reality, the Russia-Georgia dispute involved a tiny ethnic enclave with deep historical ties to Russia that resides in a tiny post-Soviet Union country. If Russia wanted to re-conquer Eastern Europe, it’s an odd place to start.

But rather than seeing the situation as the complicated mix of history and ideology that it is, McCain sees it as a reaffirmation of the Cold War worldview that informs his foreign policy. A man who wears red glasses sees everything as red. And so, it his pre-existing assumptions (and not the facts) that are driving his response….

if the Georgia crisis had happened on President McCain’s watch, these assumptions could similarly lead to some bad results. The worst result of all of course would be military entanglement. But even if McCain wasn’t quite that dumb, he could needlessly antagonize Russia, who remains (for good or bad) a key and nuclear-powered partner on a whole host of transnational issues and crises. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t speak up against an overbroad military response. But the response needs to be proportional. Citing disapproval (even strong disapproval) is one thing — “we are all Georgians” is quite another.

Mankind managed to survive the first Cold War without destroying itself. I’d prefer not to have another roll of the dice just to show how hairy-chested we are. (Obsidian Wings)

This isn’t about acquiring foreign policy cred; civilian lives are at stake all over Georgia. Like all civilians everywhere, they’re inevitably pawns in a larger international chess game. But they shouldn’t be pawns in the American presidential election as well.