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McCain's Ties To Neocon Hard Lines:
Bush Presidential Clone |
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September 2, 2008 Randy Scheunemann, one of
John McCain's top foreign policy advisers,
represents a key link in neoconservative
strategy that seeks simultaneously to remove
hostile regimes in the Middle East and to box
in Russia through an expanded NATO that
incorporates former Soviet bloc countries.
Scheunemann has come under scrutiny in recent
weeks for his past lobbying work on behalf of
the government of Georgia, even while he was
advising McCain who vowed to bar lobbyists
from his campaign.
Scheunemann's company, Orion Strategies, has
received about 0,000 from Georgia, with
payments as recently as May.
After the Aug. 7 outbreak of fighting between
Georgia and Russia over Georgia's breakaway
province of South Ossetia, McCain - advised by
Scheunemann - led a crescendo of tough
rhetoric warning of a possible new Cold War
and demanding harsh penalties against Moscow.
But Scheunemann's advice on the Russia-Georgia
conflict only captures part of his role in
shaping McCain 's neoconservative foreign
policy.
Scheunemann merges two key prongs of a neocon
global strategy for permanent U.S. military
dominance: the simultaneous projection of US
power into the Middle East and the elimination
of Russia's dream of reestablishing itself as
a major international player.
Operating mostly behind the scenes,
Scheunemann has long worked to unify former
East Bloc states into an anti-Moscow alliance
and to apply regime-change tactics against
U.S. adversaries in the Middle East, such as
Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the mullahs in
neighboring Iran.
In that regard, Scheunemann was one of the
neocon operatives who helped promote bogus
intelligence about Iraq in the run-up to the
U.S.-led invasion. He also has said the U.S.
government has not been tough enough in
dealing with other "rogue" nations, such as
Iran.
For instance, Scheunemann believes one area of
U.S. foreign policy that needs change is the
ban on assassinating leaders of foreign
governments.
"It makes no sense to regularly target command
and control nodes with precision-guided
munitions, while denying highly capable sniper
teams the ability to attack individual
targets," Scheunemann told conservative author
Bill Gertz in the 2002 book Breakdown.
According to the book, Scheunemann believed
the CIA should have been given the authority
to assassinate Saddam Hussein during the first
Persian Gulf War.
"The messy business of back-alley tradecraft
has taken a back seat to the much simpler
business of ‘liaison' with foreign
intelligence services," Scheunemann told Gertz,
adding that he would seek to change that
approach if and when he returned to the U.S.
government.
A director of the neocon Project for the New
American Century, Scheunemann worked on
McCain's failed bid for the White House in
2000 and became a top adviser to former
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2001.
Foreign contacts
But Scheunemann's primary service to the Bush
administration has come in his private
capacity as a contact to Eastern European
states as well as his association with Iraqi
exiles.
In fall 2002, Scheunemann got a green light
from the White House to launch the Committee
for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization
whose mission was to promote regime change in
the region and to gather European support for
a preemptive strike on Iraq.
"The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was
the brainchild of the Bush administration,"
the Financial Times reported on Dec. 16, 2002.
"It is said that, once the Saddam regime has
been overthrown, the CLI will act as a ‘shadow
government' for Baghdad.
"But it will limit itself to policy matters
and will not deal with details. It will,
eventually, press for a ‘competitive petroleum
production-sharing regime' which could make
OPEC irrelevant to Iraq's oil output or supply
decisions."
Scheunemann had been an early supporter of
Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress,
which supplied false intelligence to the CIA
about Hussein's alleged WMD and his supposed
ties to Osama bin Laden.
In 1998, while an adviser to Republican
Senators Bob Dole and Trent Lott, Scheunemann
drafted the Iraq Liberation Act and got the
federal government to funnel million to Iraqi
exiles associated with Chalabi's INC.
Later, the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq housed its offices at the same address as
Chalabi's INC.
Scheunemann worked closely, too, with the
White House Iraq Group, which was headed by
George W. Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
The so-called WHIG was charged with selling
the war to the American public.
In November 2002, the Washington Post reported
that Scheunemann's group would push for regime
change in Iraq through "sessions with opinion
makers, contacts for journalists and mass
marketing when the time is ripe.
On Jan. 28, 2003, the same day that President
Bush delivered his State of the Union address
that included the now-debunked claim that Iraq
had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger,
Scheunemann tapped McCain and his close ally,
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, as honorary co-chairmen
of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
"By joining our efforts, Senators McCain and
Lieberman highlight their commitment to ending
the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and freeing
the Iraqi people," Scheunemann said in a
statement issued by his committee.
McCain and Lieberman aggressively promoted the
CLI's goal of Iraqi regime change via a
preemptive military strike, which was launched
on March 19, 2003, toppling Hussein's
government in three weeks.
In an April 13, 2003, op-ed in the Los Angeles
Times, Scheunemann wrote how a "democratic
Iraq" would help remake the Middle East, an
argument that remains a focal point of
McCain's presidential campaign.
‘New Europe'
But Scheunemann also personifies another part
of the neocon agenda. He is a key bridge
between an aggressive U.S. policy in the
Middle East and the projection of U.S.
influence into the former East Bloc nations
which were long dominated by the Soviet Union.
In October 2002, during the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq, President Bush considered
naming Scheunemann as a special envoy to the
Iraqi opposition. But Scheunemann was judged
to have more value enlisting Eastern European
nations into the "Coalition of the Willing."
So, Scheunemann pulled together the "Vilnius
10" group of East European nations - Slovenia,
Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, Albania, Croatia and
Macedonia - in support of Bush's war policy.
At the time, some foreign policy analysts
recognized this collaboration as part of the
neoconservative desire to build up NATO to
circumvent the United Nations Charter, which
bars military attacks without UN sanction.
"With NATO now set to enlarge from 19 members
to take on seven East European nations
including the three Baltic states, it is said
that both the Bush team and the [Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq] want the political
mechanism of the Atlantic alliance to replace
the UN Security Council in giving multilateral
legitimacy to any major U.S. action outside
North America," the Financial Times reported
on Dec. 16, 2002.
"This is because, unlike the UN Security
Council where the French or Russians might
block American action, NATO's political
decisions do not require consensus. Only
NATO's military decisions require consensus."
For actual military operations, President Bush
made clear he would rely on ad hoc alliances,
such as the Iraq War's "Coalition of the
Willing."
The reward for the "willing" Eastern European
countries, which the Bush administration
called "New Europe," was future inclusion in
NATO with the umbrella of its mutual security
guarantee that treats an attack on one as an
attack on all.
"Considering the nations - including the
Baltic states - signed on the group at the
expense of creating a schism in the European
Union, the Scheunemann initiative was
unanimously regarded as a diplomatic triumph
for Washington and a coup d'etat in Brussels,"
the Baltic Times reported in August 2003.
Scheunemann's crossover between his work on
the Iraq invasion and his connections to
former East Bloc countries proved lucrative,
too. He advised them that their collaboration
on the Iraq War could get them Iraqi
reconstruction contracts as well as U.S.
support for their entry into NATO.
He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
from countries, such as Romania which paid him
5,000 for providing advice on Iraqi
reconstruction deals.
For another lobbying client, Latvia,
Scheunemann made himself even more valuable.
He helped form the Latvian Builders Strategic
Partnership, a consortium for parlaying
Latvia's support for the Iraq invasion into a
cut of the multimillion-dollar reconstruction
spending.
Five months after the U.S.-led invasion,
Scheunemann met with Peteris Elferts, Latvia's
parliamentary secretary in the Foreign
Ministry and ambassador-at-large for Iraqi
policy, and Valdis Birkavs, chairman of the
Latvian Builders Strategic Partnership, about
constructing an information technology system
in Baghdad.
Georgia, another of Scheunemann's lobbying
clients, also backed the Iraq invasion,
contributed troops, and thus counted on
Washington's support to bring it into NATO.
Though other NATO members, especially "Old
Europe" nations like France, blocked Georgia's
admission, Georgia's pro-US president Mikheil
Saakashvili apparently believed he would have
Western backing on Aug. 7 when he launched an
offensive against the breakaway province of
South Ossetia.
Instead, the Russian military intervened to
drive back the Georgian army and then took up
security positions inside Georgian territory.
McCain joined with leading neoconservative
voices in denouncing the Russian attack.
McCain's tough talk about Russia and his
insistence that he will only tolerate
"victory" in Iraq offer an important insight
into what his foreign policy would look like
if he wins the presidency.
Surrounded by hardcore neoconservatives, like
Scheunemann, there is every reason to believe
that a McCain administration would continue
using force to impose Washington's will in the
Middle East while engaging in geopolitical
brinkmanship against old rivals like Moscow.
-- Jason Leopold is an investigative
reporter and the author of News Junkie. His
website is pubrecord.org. ConsortiumNews |
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