Organizing for America | Chris Casarez's Blog: McCain: More Republican Fear Mongering

McCain: More Republican Fear Mongering

By Chris Casarez - Sep 23rd, 2008 at 12:49 am EDT

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McCain: More Republican Fear Mongering

Over the last month and half, the media has continually referred to Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia which resulted in a counteroffensive from the Russians, as “The Russian Invasion.” John McCain has jumped on this opportunity to verbally condemn Russia, and berate Barack Obama for ‘weak’ foreign policy, adding to the usual argument: The Democrats are weak appeasers, and only we can protect you.

My first reaction to this was frustration, over yet another irresponsible knee-jerk reaction to a situation with a long and complicated geopolitical history. Long story short: Georgia invaded a small country known as South Ossetia, which few of us Americans have ever heard about. This is in part, because generally we tend to not know what a map looks like outside of the US, and even worse, those of us in California tend have difficulty differentiating the states that begin with an ‘M.’ But even this can’t be blamed for our ignorance on South Ossetia, because it’s not even on our maps that we tend to never study.

To make a long story short: South Ossetia declared its independence of Georgia, when Georgia declared its independence of Russia. It subsequently won its independence in a civil war, then drafted its own constitution (sound familiar)? Of course, this does not mean that it's recognized by NATO as its own cuntry. On August 8th, the eve of the Beijing Olympics, Georgian troops and tanks rolled into South Ossetia, in an attempt to annex the region (Video: Georgian tanks head for South Ossetia). See timeline of events here.

The Russian invasion was in fact a response to this action. The Russians drove the Georgians out of South Ossetia and moved into Georgia itself (Video: 12-year-old South Ossetian explains this to Fox News (the Russians were greeted as liberators) and Testimony of an American vacationing in South Ossetia). Whether or not Russia’s response was disproportionate can certainly be debated, but it’s difficult to even have the debate when we have a media that does little/nothing to actually explain the sequence of events, and we are left with our ant-Russian confirmation biases satisfied. After all, those of us who grew up in the 80’s know that Russians are evil people who wear funny hats and live in perpetual snow. This only satisfies our inherited bias.

In fact, after hearing the phrase “separatists” instead of South Ossetians numerous times, I came to realize that even the Russian entrance into South Ossetia was considered part of the invasion, given that South Ossetia itself is regarded as part of Georgia.

The point of this rant is the following: Like Bush, McCain seems all too eager to follow the same “evildoer” foreign policy as Bush. The media doesn’t help us much, by giving us skewed sound bytes that give us a false snapshot on long and complicated situations. What we are left with, are presidents that are given a free pass in their bully-like foreign policy.

This becomes all the more unnerving when we factor in McCain’s frightening blunders, like referring to Putin as the President of Germany, or thinking Iraq shares a border with Pakistan.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia: 2008 South Ossetia war
Article: Blowback From Bear-Baiting by Pat Buchanan
Video: Day one of the Georgia-South Ossetia military conflict

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