And None Dare Call It Treason

And None Dare Call It Treason
by Patrick J. Buchanan
August 22, 2008
http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan95.html

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

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.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
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.

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.

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.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

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.

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?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display
in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scheunemann's résumé 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.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on
Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same
discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of
George Bush?

"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.

Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American
Conservative . He is also the author of
seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong and A Republic Not
An Empire. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary
War.