by Robert Scheer
Cre­ators Syn­di­cate, Inc.

Is it pos­si­ble that this time the Octo­ber sur­prise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave lit­tle Geor­gia strug­gling for its sur­vival from the grasp of the Russ­ian bear was stoked to influ­ence the U.S. pres­i­den­tial election?

Before you dis­miss that pos­si­bil­ity, con­sider the role of one Randy Sche­une­mann, for four years a paid lob­by­ist for the Geor­gian gov­ern­ment, end­ing his offi­cial lob­by­ing con­nec­tion only in March, months after he became Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Sen. John McCain’s senior for­eign pol­icy adviser.

Pre­vi­ously, Sche­une­mann was best known as one of the neo­con­ser­v­a­tives who engi­neered the war in Iraq when he was a direc­tor of the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. It was Sche­une­mann who, after work­ing on the McCain 2000 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, headed the Com­mit­tee for the Lib­er­a­tion of Iraq, which cham­pi­oned the U.S. Iraq invasion.

There are tell­tale signs that he played a sim­i­lar role in the recent Geor­gia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and for­mer employer, Geor­gian Pres­i­dent Mikhail Saakashvili, in order­ing an inva­sion of the break­away region of South Osse­tia, which clearly was expected to pro­duce a Russ­ian counter-reaction. It is incon­ceiv­able that Saakashvili would have trig­gered this dan­ger­ous esca­la­tion with­out some assur­ance from influ­en­tial Amer­i­cans he trusted, like Sche­une­mann, that the United States would have his back. Sche­une­mann long guided McCain in these mat­ters, even before he was offi­cially run­ning for­eign pol­icy for McCain’s pres­i­den­tial campaign.

In 2005, while reg­is­tered as a paid lob­by­ist for Geor­gia, Sche­une­mann worked with McCain to draft a con­gres­sional res­o­lu­tion push­ing for Georgia’s mem­ber­ship in NATO. A year later, while still on the Geor­gian pay­roll, Sche­une­mann accom­pa­nied McCain on a trip to that coun­try, where they met with Saakashvili and sup­ported his bel­li­cose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Sche­une­mann is at the cen­ter of the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive cabal that has come to dom­i­nate the Repub­li­can candidate’s for­eign pol­icy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always look­ing for a for­eign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the col­lapse of Sad­dam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Rus­sia that came increas­ingly to fit the bill.

Yes, it sounds dia­bol­i­cal, but that may be the most accu­rate way to assess the designs of the McCain cam­paign in mat­ters of war and peace. There is every indi­ca­tion that the candidate’s demo­niza­tion of Putin is an even grander plan than the pre­vi­ous use of Hus­sein to fuel Amer­i­can mil­i­tarism with the fear­some enemy that it des­per­ately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Sen. Barack Obama, scram­bling to make sense of a more mea­sured for­eign pol­icy pos­ture, will seem weak in com­par­i­son. Mean­while, the dire con­se­quences of the Bush legacy McCain has inher­ited, from the dis­as­ter of Iraq to the eco­nomic melt­down, con­ve­niently will be ignored. But it will pro­vide the military-industrial com­plex, which has helped bankroll the neo­con­ser­v­a­tives, with an excuse for ramp­ing up a mil­i­tary bud­get that is already big­ger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neo­con­ser­v­a­tive, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Rus­sia is turned into an enemy that ramps up its largely reduced mil­i­tary, and Putin is cast as the new Joseph Stalin bogey­man, evok­ing images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has con­demned a “revan­chist Rus­sia” that should once again be con­tained. Although Putin has been the enor­mously pop­u­lar elected leader of post-Communist Rus­sia, it is assumed that impe­ri­al­ism is always lurk­ing, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russ­ian people.

How con­ve­nient to for­get that Stalin was a Geor­gian, and indeed if Russ­ian troops had occu­pied the threat­ened Geor­gian town of Gori, they would have found a museum still hon­or­ing their local boy, who made good by seiz­ing con­trol of the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion. Indeed five Russ­ian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday.

It should also be men­tioned that the post-Communist Geor­gians have impe­r­ial designs on South Osse­tia and Abk­hazia. What a stark con­tra­dic­tion that the United States, which cham­pi­oned Kosovo’s inde­pen­dence from Ser­bia, now is ignor­ing Georgia’s inva­sion of its eth­ni­cally rebel­lious provinces.

For McCain to so fer­vently embrace Scheunemann’s neo­con­ser­v­a­tive line of demo­niz­ing Rus­sia in the inter­est of appear­ing tough dur­ing an elec­tion is a reminder that a sen­a­tor can be old and yet wildly irresponsible.