Georgia: McCain and U.S. Foreign Policy

The Nation carries an opinion piece criticizing U.S. foreign policy in the South Caucasus and especially as it relates to the ongoing conflict between Georgia and Russia which now appears to be nothing short of all-out war and an invasion of a sovereign country by Moscow. According to many Washington observers’s U.S. Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain’s position on Georgia might even be more “hawkish” than George W. Bush.

The outbreak of war in Georgia on Friday offers a disturbing and somewhat surreal taste of what to expect from John McCain should he become our nation’s Commander in Chief. As the centuries-old ethnic animosities between Georgia and Ossetia boiled over into another armed conflict, drawing in neighboring Russia, McCain issued a stark-raving statement from Des Moines that is disturbingly reminiscent of the language used in the lead-up to NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999, a war McCain zealously pushed for:

Calling on NATO to “stabilize this dangerous situation” is not going down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have put the country in a very vengeful mood. It’s hard to imagine what measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and who runs around singing “Bomb Bomb Iran!” it’s not hard to guess–and even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009, should he win.

McCain’s call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it’s also delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen’s own recent assessment.