A bad week for Obama

Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twenty first in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.

Clearly the gods are smiling on ‘cranky old’ John McCain.

Last Sunday’s column, reporting the war then erupting between Russia and Georgia, opined that if Vladimir Putin (still the real power in Russia) went too far in imposing his designs upon a defeated Georgia, “the happy warrior” McCain would find himself  “in his element at last, to the consternation — and perhaps a grave blow to his presidential aspirations — of Obama the Negotiator.” And that’s indeed how it’s been panning out.

To recap:
By last Tuesday, the military business was effectively over. Russian tanks and bombing runs had driven Georgia’s US-backed forces out of the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and that evening the Kremlin declared a cease-fire. (Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili had been crying uncle since the weekend.) The Kremlin’s cease-fire, however, was equivocal: Russian forces, largely unopposed, went on to take control of Georgia’s main Black Sea port, and of the crucial crossroads town of Gori — effectively threatening to cut Georgia in two – and were continuing to degrade Georgia’s radar and military installations at will. That this was not just a temporary incursion was made clear by Russia’s Foreign Minister, who declared that Georgia could “forget about” reclaiming sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But if the military situation was clear, the political situation was rapidly escalating in complication and danger. For a US administration headed by the oilmen, Bush and Cheney, huge stakes were involved — not only the West’s giant pipelines running through Georgia but the entire cordon sanitaire of military bases and military assistance treaties which the Bush administration has been busy constructing on the southern and western periphery of Russia’s Caucasian oilfields. And the Bush administration — so inept in action, as Katrina showed — was again without peer when it came to “spinning.”

The White House’s — and McCain’s — first PR coup was to establish, for domestic consumption, the narrative of what Mr Bush last week denounced as Russia’s “bullying intimidation” and “brutal” actions — and what McCain likewise characterized as “Moscow’s path of violent aggression” – against Georgia’s ‘courageous [little] democracy.” (In fact it was Georgia’s Saakashvili who launched the indiscriminate mortar bombardment against the capital of South Ossetia that gave Putin the excuse to invade Georgia.)

Via that narrative, the old Cold War was suddenly off and running once again, to the delight of the Cheney neo-cons and McCain. And if, as seems quite possible, this dramatically changes the parameters of the current race for the White House, it can only shift them heavily in McCain’s favour, and against Obama’s pacific weltanschauung.

At the same time, McCain has so far niftily escaped blame for pushing Saakashvili into his fateful blunder — this even though McCain’s chief foreign policy advisor also worked until very recently as Saakashvili’s Washington lobbyist, and the Republican nominee has long been on nickname terms with the Georgian hothead.

As The Washington Post summed up: “By promising Georgia America’s undying support, Senator McCain basically told the 90-pound weakling that America had its back if it threw a punch at Russia. Georgia’s Saakashvili did just that last week, launching a lightening [sic] attack to retake its separatist province — and lo and behold, the bully struck back with overwhelming force. But Senator McCain couldn’t keep his promise.”

In other words, Georgia last week was a Republican reprise on the aftermath of the first Gulf War, when then President GHW Bush encouraged Iraq’s Shiites to revolt against Sunni rule, then stood by and watched as Saddam slaughtered them.

The White House’s and McCain’s second toss was to sell the US electorate a fiction of American power in the current crisis. Mr Bush has dedicated much of the past few days to public bluster — Russia ‘must’ do this, Russia ‘must’ do that – Russia won’t, of course — while McCain has been rallying his countrymen. In the great tradition of heraldic presidential rhetoric, McCain informed a Republican audience in Pennsylvania last week that “Today we are all Georgians” (an ascription that probably startled his listeners into wondering what Philadelphia had to do with Atlanta).

Then McCain got down to the nitty-gritty. “We have important strategic interests at stake in Georgia,” he explained, “especially the continued flow of oil through the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline… and the integrity and influence of Nato, whose members reaffirmed last April the territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Georgia.”

And McCain, happy and feeling like himself at last, in the long travail of a campaign which, wary of his legendary ‘temper,’ has continually cued him to smile at the wrong places in his stump speeches, went on to unburden himself of a little history lesson on Georgia. That much of it was promptly demonstrated to have been lifted from Wikipedia wasn’t likely to hurt his ‘knowledgeable statesman’ image with an audience unlikely to have heard of the online encyclopedia. Delivering his own warnings to Putin, the Republican nominee was almost a caricature of statesmanlike solemnity.

The White House’s third response to ‘Putin’s War’ was in action; and these ranged from being neither here nor there — the Pentagon cancelled scheduled joint military exercises with Russia — to cautiously provocative — delivering humanitarian aid to Tbilisi in military cargo planes that indubitably carried intelligence and other ‘non-humanitarian’ supplies as well — to screamingly confrontational: the conclusion, on Thursday, of a treaty with Poland to erect a missile defence shield aimed, obviously, at Russia.

Russia has repeatedly made clear its serious objection to such a shield, which would materially alter the balance of nuclear power between it and the US. Indeed, months ago, it warned that in retaliation it might re-aim its ballistic missiles at Europe. But two days ago a senior Russian general warned the Poles that by signing the treaty they were opening themselves to possible nuclear attack. Coming from a Kremlin not given recently to bluster, that took what used to be called ‘East-West tensions’ to a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis.

But McCain’s remedies are equally militaristic. “Working with allied partners,” he declared, “the US should immediately consult with the Ukrainian government and other concerned countries on steps to secure their continued independence [and] to strengthen the     security of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.” (Translation: US and/or Nato troops and war materiel should be based in Ukraine, and also deployed to guard the Tbilisi oil pipeline.)

And all this has been happening while Obama has been on vacation in Hawaii.

The narrative of this election may be changing. Last week the US print media was full of headlines like ‘McCain Displays Credentials as Obama Relaxes’; and McCain was making his own news at last, and not merely for attacking Obama.

Commented the NYT: “It is as if the candidates’ images have been reversed within a matter of a few weeks. When Mr Obama was overseas last month, Mr. McCain’s foreign policy bona fides seemed diminished…Now, Mr. Obama’s voice seems muted at a time when much of the world has been worriedly watching the conflict.”

With Bill and Hillary all ready to hijack Obama’s Democratic Convention next week, it may be that, for the first time, the odds have begun turning against the Golden Boy.