Posted on 08/22/2008 5:01:13 PM PDT by dragnet2
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.
Does this article have any basis in reality, or is it just a McCain hit-piece?
Look at the author.. that should explain everything..
Ok, I missed that it was by Pat Buchanan. That pretty much answers my question.
President Bush, saving your ass whether you like it or not.
Pat, Pat, Pat!
There’s no such thing as peace, only R&R.
Not sure specificially which documents you’re referring to?
I strongly suggest you buy a map of Asia. Or at least call one up on Google if you happen to know how to use the Internet. Now, check out the location of Afghanistan. And note how Georgia is a narrow avenue to Central Asia between Russia and Iran. And that Georgia provides us the means to both fly planes from Europe to Afghanistan and to allow Caspian oil to bypass Russia and Iran. And now tell us how Georgia is NOT a vital US national security interest.
Oops, never mind. You probably would LIKE more oil revenues to flow to your fascist soul brothers in both countries, and for us to be hamstrung in Afghanistan. And you're probably mad that we have bases in Europe because it means we beat Hitler's ass in WWII. A war YOU thought wasn't worth fighting.
So Pat, tell us again why we should give a rat's arse about your opinion whether a war is worth fighting or not.
I don’t know why this crowd no matter the message—automatically imputes treachery to Buchanan. For instance, the Israelis stopped sending arms and support to the Georgians as soon as the Russian conflict heated up. Does that make Israel sellouts, treasonous, turncoats to America and its interests?
I would be willing to bet that many on this board who now condemn Buchanan for being unwilling to support the Georgians would not be so happy to condemn Israel for doing the same thing.
For that matter I would be willing to bet that most on this board could not even find South Ossetia on the map before this conflict heated up.
It isn't.
On the other hand, if Georgia were already a member state, Russia wouldn't have been so ready to allow artillery harrassment of Georgians. Georgia wouldn't have been so ready to launch an intervention they would need NATO backing for.
More likely, none of this would have happened.
The current demarkation would have simply become the border.
As it is, this is what is going to happen. Georgia will not admit it, but if they want into NATO they will have to forget Ossetia. NATO isn't going to fight for it. Russia will have to rein in their bully boys, because NATO won't stand for it. Granted, there won't be much militarily they can do about it, but their diplomats will simply annoy everyone until it stops.
NATO membership is a two-edged instrument. Georgia is defended, but Georgia's military gets some third-party supervision.
I think a case could be made that Putin favors McCain. His adventure in Georgia has probably made McCain's election a certainty.
I could be wrong, but I would suspect it was due to him bailing out of the Republican party.
For instance, the Israelis stopped sending arms and support to the Georgians as soon as the Russian conflict heated up. Does that make Israel sellouts, treasonous, turncoats to America and its interests?
lol..I didn't know this. If you have a link, I'd like to see it.
I'll check back in a couple hours. Gotta get back to work.
Oh I have a link...
http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=27365
Ooops, says not.
And perhaps Israel, if it decided to keep it’s weapons was thinking about two things.
1. Iran knocking on their door
2. The good old USA will help the Georgians. They need to watch their own backs
Quotes from Pat Buchanan:
“Washington D.C. is Israeli-occupied territory.”
“Only the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States wanted to fight Saddam Hussein.”
“Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”
“This so-called Holocaust Survivor syndrome involves group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics.”
Sounds like another "Neocon" kook conspiracy theory by P Buchanan. Im sure Obama agrees completely with his "neocon" war conspiracies. Those sneaky "neocons" in the Bush Administration picking on Iraq, Iran and baiting those poor unsuspecting Russians.
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