August Surprise?

If you had told me at the start of summer that Georgia would be a bigger wedge issue in this election than Iraq, I would have given you some spare change and hurried on my way. But so it is. And hideously so: the Administration took a full 48 hours to wheel around from publicly taking the Obama position to a wary, reluctant version of McCain’s bristling position, and now McCain’s men are busying themselves decrying anyone who two days ago held the majority opinion about the complexity level of the Russo-Georgian War as a useless dimwit and pinko commie symp. It’s a nightmarish oversimplification of a situation that, Rose Revolution notwithstanding, will never fit cleanly into the us-versus-them dynamic which would make solidarity with Georgia such an easy reflex. Listen to this [thru John McCormack]:

John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann criticized the apparent moral equivalence in Obama’s statement…

(i.e. “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, to avoid an escalation to full scale war.” Wild, I know.)

…“That’s kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] … that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint”.

This is a most shamefully deliberate effort on McCain’s part to obscure, muddle, and confuse the reality of the situation in Georgia and Russia beyond all recognition. I cannot believe I actually have to point out that Saddam Hussein, unlike Putin and Medvedev, conquered and annexed Kuwait (five months before we actually lifted a finger, if I remember correctly); and that not only the Soviet Union but a whole coalition army of communist regimes piled in to overthrow Prague’s fleeting liberal regime. Nothing even close is happening here.

But all the foregoing is window-dressing compared to the comic book levels of distortion necessary to portray Georgia’s Saakashvili as a crushed daisy or hapless innocent. This is a man who pro-democracy advocates everywhere will fawn over and applaud unless he is sending out the state blackguards to beat his own citizens into submission for daring to gather in the street and suggest publicly that he is a power-grasping freak. Such episodes lost safely to willfully bad memories, Georgia’s defenders can ignore in kind the sorry point that Saakashvili himself began this war by attempting to do by sneak attack when he was unable to do to over years of cajoling and coercion — destroy the autonomy of peoples who have rejected Georgian rule since its outset in 1991.

None of which means I don’t have a soft spot for Georgia, love their flag, or support the rule of law and representative government over fiat and autocracy. I do. Nor am I certain that Russia will stop attacking Georgia proper when it should, which as of this writing is today. Even more important, for American purposes, than determining the precise percentage by which Saakashvili is responsible for his own country’s woe is making clear that the McCain campaign’s attempt to cast foreign policy prudence as something only an idiot like Obama would consider is a serious blunder of epic proportions and an embarrassment to thinking people everywhere.

And I can say all this without making even a hint of an allegation about the coincidence involved in McCain’s top foreign policy man taking Saakashvili’s line after having worked profitably enough as a lobbyist for his government. There is no need to open the question of bias if the question of foolishness is closed.

UPDATE: this post has been rendered almost wholly irrelevant by today’s events. Obama’s position is now almost identical to McCain’s, and the Russians have pushed into Georgia proper. I go on at more length here.