World-News

Steve Weissman, Truthout: "John McCain calls the conflict in Georgia 'the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War,' and he is doing everything he can to make it his own, even at the cost of upstaging the shrinking President Bush. But the tragedy in Georgia also reveals the most embarrassing foreign policy blunder since - well, since the Bush administration decided to wage a preemptive war in Iraq. If deep thinkers in Washington insist on setting up a string of client states to encircle Russia, they should never let the puppets pull their own strings, as [Georgian President] Mikheil Saakashvili appears to have done when he sent his army into rebellious South Ossetia."

http://www.truthout.org/article/mccains-war-playing-with-nuclear-fire

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Are You Ready For Nuclear War?
http://vdare.com/roberts/080818_you.htm


Informant: shane_digital

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McCain’s Georgian hyperbole

Reason
by Matt Welch

08/18/08

Let’s review what McCain is alleging here: Not only does Russia have malevolent designs on recently detached ‘Near Abroad’ territories within nearby Georgia, Belarus, and Moldova — a critique, I hasten to add, that I share — McCain warns that the Bear is also working actively toward re-swallowing all or much of such Russian colonial holdings-turned sovereign states as, oh, Finland, Armenia, the Baltics, a pack of ’stans, and a big chunk of Poland. It’s one thing to look into Putin’s eyes and (accurately) see three letters: K-G-B, quite another to base your foreign policy approach on the assumption that the second biggest nuclear arsenal in the world wants to go on the biggest nation-gobbling rampage the globe has seen in over 60 years, devouring a half-dozen NATO members in the process. These aren’t the exaggerations of a novice or a naif; quite the opposite, actually...

http://www.reason.com/news/show/128142.html



Putin overplays a strong hand

National Review
by the editors

08/18/08

In the middle of last week the Georgia crisis seemed destined to end in a clear victory for Russia. It had subdued its fractious, independent neighbor. All but one of the energy pipelines between Central Asia and Western Europe were under its direct control — and the single exception was but a few hours away by tank. A stern lesson had been sent to former Soviet possessions, inside and outside the Commonwealth of Independent States, that they live in Russia’s zone of influence and must conform to Russian foreign policy. The European Union had forsworn any criticism of Moscow’s open aggression to protect its own status as a ‘mediator.’ The U.S. had failed to offer any real succor to Georgia. Thousands of ‘peace’ demonstrators unaccountably had failed to appear in the streets to protest Russian aggression. And the world was moving on. Then Russia overplayed a very strong hand...

http://tinyurl.com/5mxbwg


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Meet the Senator Most Likely to Start a Nuclear War

The Real McCain

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

McCain the Maverick is a merely a fine-honed act, underscored by these kinds of casual hypocrisies.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20689.htm



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