John McCain: “Today, we are all Georgians.”
I was just eating lunch, watching CNN cover a live McCain town hall event which he began by giving a brief review of the situation in Georgia. (I'll try to find a video or transcript after posting.)
I'm blown away by the extent to which he painted the conflict in black-and-white terms. No mention of Georgia's refusal to grant independence to the breakaway provinces, no mention of Russia's allegations that Georgia provoked the hostilities with military incursions into S. Ossettia.
Now don't get me wrong: Russia is clearly in the wrong here. I do not buy for a moment Moscow's claim that this is all a big humanitarian effort, nor do I doubt that they were waiting for this opportunity to invade Georgia. Russia has become increasingly imperial during the last decade, and it clearly has intentions on any of the satellite states who harbor pro-Western sympathies.
That said, nothing - nothing - in international relations is as simplistic as the Bush administration would have us believe, and McCain seems to be following the same script. He emphasized an applause line about Georgian troops serving in Iraq alongside Americans, and he relayed a earlier conversation with a Georgian representative in which he claimed to have said something along the lines of, "I speak for all Americans when I say, 'Today, we are all Georgians'" (which recalls the "We are all Americans" international sentiments after 9/11).
This scares me, not just because of the current situation, but because it perpetuates the "with us or against us" mentality. The world is too complex, we are too interdependent, for this "cowboy diplomacy" to continue.
This is, of course, about the election: by setting it up in these terms, McCain gets to paint Obama as weak when he tries to draw out the shades of gray. But no election is worth the damage done to our country's standing in the international community.