Russia, Georgia, Iran, and the United States…

In case you forgot, there was a war a couple of weeks ago, and John McCain made himself look like an ass to anyone who studies geopolitics, but looked all macho and mavericky to the corporate media blah blah blah…

Anyway. Go read this article about what’s going on now, a reminder of how things got where they are, the ill-advised US war with Iran that’s still coming (you better believe it…October surprise, anyone?), and how Russia is sitting in the proverbial catbird seat for every bit of it. Russia and the United States used to work together, if warily and with an air of distrust. Thanks to the Bush administration’s poor calculations and policies (thanks, neocon stupids!), the United States and Russia are now pretty much enemies again. Here’s part of the review section:

First, let’s recall the U.S. moves over the past seven years that have left Russia feeling threatened. The Bush administration cut off participation in U.S.-Russian actions that stretched back through the Clinton and G.H.W. Bush administrations, abrogated the anti-ABM treaty, pushed for the expansion of NATO right up Russia’s borders [stupid! - Ed.] and have made noises about including Ukraine and Georgia in the alliance, built an oil and gas pipeline through Southern Georgia explicitly in order to ensure that it would be outside Russia’s control, armed and trained the Georgian military and brought the Israelis in to do the same, and reached an agreement to station missiles and U.S. forces in Poland and Czechoslovakia on the laughable premise that these nations need to be protected against Iran. In the last month that pretense has been dropped completely: Polish government representatives, in particular, are quite explicit about their desire to have Americans standing in the way of any Russian incursion to guarantee an American military response.

The point is that Russia is not just feeling unfriendly toward us; Putin and Medveydev view the U.S. as something close to an outright enemy. On August 27th Russia’s envoy to NATO stated that U.S. assistance to Georgia would be a “declaration of war”; on August 29th Putin suggested that the U.S. had deliberately encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia in order to help McCain’s presidential campaign and that U.S. military advisors had helped the Georgian forces during the conflict; today (Sept. 1) Russian sources are claiming that U.S. ships carrying humanitarian aid have also been supplying the Georgians with weapons.

Read the whole thing, and remember: John McCain is dumber and more hawkish with his foreign policy than Bush and Cheney ever were. He’s more impulsive. His selection of a “hockey mum” as his running mate, a woman he didn’t vet at all, is evidence of his poor judgment.

A vote for John McCain would be disastrous. He’s simply not equipped to inherit the geopolitical situation George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are leaving him.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are, though.