'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Georgia: More grandstanding?

If the situation in Georgia weren't so tragic, it would be pretty amusing to see George W. Bush now posing as the guardian and gatekeeper of international legitimacy. In his statement in the Rose Garden today, he prissily lectured the Russians that,

Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic, and security structures of the 21st century. The United States has supported those efforts. Now Russia is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions. To begin to repair the damage to its relations with the United States, Europe, and other nations, and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must keep its word and act to end this crisis...

As it is, given the extreme constraints at both the logistical and the political levels on the Bush administration's ability to respond militarily to Russia's undoubted excesses in Georgia, all Washington is able to do is organize some airlifts of humanitarian supplies into Georgia.

As for Georgia's intemperate president, Mikheil Saakashvili, he briefly claimed today that this airlift meant that the US would be taking over his country's ports and airports. Yesterday, he had told CNN that the Russians were about to encircle his his capital. He said (once again) that the whole fate of world democracy was imperiled in his country, while he also blamed "the west" for letting his countrymen down.

Perhaps all those attempts at moral blackmail were intended to cover up for his own extreme lack of forethought in having provoked the Russian response with his military assault on South Ossetia last week?

In the event, little of Saak's blackmail worked. The Pentagon was quick to "shoot down" the suggestion its forces were about to take over Georgia's ports and airports. The the airlift to Tbilisi is being described as "continuous and robust"-- but it will also apparently be strictly limited to humanitarian supplies. (I note that many items useful in humanitarian relief ops are also dual-use as basic military items; but at a certain level of military materiel, including all forms of weaponry and ammunition, these items have no reasonable "humanitarian" purpose.)

And while we're looking at people seeking to use the present crisis for purposes of political grandstanding, top of that list must be Sen. John McCain, who is reportedly despatching two of his key advisers, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia.

I find this outrageous. The foreign policy of the country is supposed to be run by the President, and it can only considerably complicate the delicate task Bush faces in doing this if either of the candidates seems to be running his own foreign policy separate from that of the president.

Bush should rein in McCain and his Senatorial wingmen, in no uncertain terms.

(Imagine the uproar if Obama announced that her was sending his own personal envoys to Georgia to deal with the situation there!)

It is also, of course, extremely relevant that McCain's key foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunman was until very recently a paid lobbyist for the Georgian president.

Another question: Though Lieberman and Graham are working as high-level advisers to the McCain campaign, they are also members of the US Senate in their own right. So if they do travel to Georgia in the days ahead, will they do so as Senators or as McCain campaign people?

It is all so very murky that they would do a lot better just not to go.