I've finally achieved consistency in my life. Any person of average or above intelligence can predict what I will say next with unerring accuracy. And what I say will always be wrong.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] Obama, McCain and Brzezinski

On the Counterpunch website, Bill Blum wrote

One of Obama's chief foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man instrumental in provoking Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, which was followed by massive US military supplies to the opposition and widespread war.

Yesterday Alexander Cockburn wrote:

Also on McCain's team are various members of the Brzezinski clan, headed by Zbigniev,

I emailed Blum, and asked:
Which is it?  Are they both true?  Good Lord, things are worse than I thought!

Blum replied:
That is weird.  I'd guess the connection to McCain is incorrect.  Brzezinski is more or less a Democrat.  Have you tried googling?  It might be one of his sons that's the base of the confusion.
Bill Blum

Today Cockburn's article was corrected to read:

McCain's chief foreign policy advisor, a rabid hawk called Randy Scheunemann, has until recently worn two hats, acting as McCain's lead foreign policy man and also as a lobbyist for Georgia. Filings by the McCain campaign and reports to the US Department of Commerce required of all lobbyists acting for foreign governments show that between Jan. 1, 2007, and May 15, 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 and, across the same period , the government of Georgia paid Scheunemann's firm,Orion Strategies, $290,000 in lobbying fees. Scheuneman has since quit the lobbying firm, a 2-man operation.

So Scheunemann indubitably had the ears of both Saakashvili and of McCain. What advice he tendered his patrons is a matter of speculation, but any advisor to McCain would certainly regard a vintage cold-war era confrontation between the United States and Russia as potentially a huge plus for McCain.  The Republican candidate certainly seized the opportunity for manly bluster about Russia's conduct.

Equally rabid is Zbigniev Brzezinski, a sometime advisor to Obama and a veteran cold warrior from the Carter presidency of the 1970s. Brzezinski has publicly boasted of his role, as President Carter's foreign policy adviser, in luring the Russians into their ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. A year later the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics of 1980, accompanied in this gesture by China. Brzezinski, a Pole, is fanatically anti-Russian and has been thundering on the TV talk shows about the era of darkness that will descend of mankind if Russia is permitted to put Georgia in its place.

As a professional globe-spinner, Zbig is given to rhetorical sweeps, opening his 2004 book "The Grand Chessboard" with the thumping dictum that "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power....." The key to controlling Eurasia, Brzezinski says grandly, is controlling the Central Asian Republics. This portentous nonsense goes back to the British geographer Halford John Mackinder, whose "heartland" theory was hugely influential in the first half of the twentieth century. "Who rules East Europe," Mackinder proclaimed at the time of the Versailles peace conference in 1919,  "commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World." Mackinder, like Brzezinski, was a great threat-monger about the Russians, and a big promoter of White intervention against the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. (The most readable expression of the "heartland" obsession, close relative of "the great gamne"  – is John Buchan's thriller, Greenmantle.

***

Nice to know that the same Dr. Strangelovian cold and hot war mongering fanatic isn't advising both major candidates! No, the two candidates have different Dr. Strangelovian cold and hot war mongering fanatics advising them. I'll sleep better knowing this.



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