- Who is Randy Scheunemann?
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- 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.
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- But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy
on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's
camp.
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- The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing
for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
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- Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
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- Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the
same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George
Bush?
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- "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.
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- Copyright Creators Syndicate
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