Posted by Jed Lewison on Sat Aug 16, 2008 at 1:08 AM Pacific

Russia, Georgia, and the campaign

I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to the situation with Russia and Georgia as I ought to have, but tonight I finally took a few minutes to acquaint myself with some of the basic facts of the situation.

If you already know your stuff about the crisis, the information in this post will be old hat, but if you were like me you might find some of these links interesting. If you have anything to ad, or I've said anything boneheaded, please sound off in the comments -- I'm eager to learn more, and I'm sure others are as well.

South Ossetia, the flashpoint of the conflict, is a pro-Russian breakaway region of Georgia. Although it is within Georgian territory, Georgia did not and does not control it. In 1991, when Georgia voted to declare independence from the USSR, South Ossetians refused to participate in the vote as a show of solidarity with Moscow.
In mid-July, about 1,000 U.S. troops participated in war games exercises with the Georgian military.
In 2003, Mikheil Saakashvili took power in Georgia. He was 35 years old. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which considered themselves independent of Georgia, immediately began discussions with Moscow and by mid-2004 there were violent clashes between Georgia and the breakaway regions.
In 2006, McCain and Saakashvili rode jet skis together as Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for Saakashvili who is now McCain's top foreign policy adviser, looked on.
BBC has put together a timeline of the situation, starting on August 7, the day before Georgia launched its initiative to claim South Ossetia.
On August 8, the NYT reported that "Georgian officials said their troops had made a significant incursion into the breakaway region, South Ossetia, in response to what the officials contended were provocations from over the border, including shelling. The Georgian officials said they had taken up positions outside the capital of the enclave, Tskhinvali."
South Ossetian leaders condemned Georgia's move, which angered the populace.
There are currently a small number of American special forces troops in Georgia.
At this point, the U.S. objective seems to be to get Russian forces to at least withdraw back into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which is pretty close to the status quo ante.

I'm no expert, but this whole thing seems like the result of another botched foreign policy adventure by the Bush crew, this time with a big assist from John McCain who certainly led Georgia to believe the U.S. would intervene on its behalf.

It seems pretty clear that at least in the short-term sense, Georgia is almost entirely responsible for having touched off the crisis, even if Russia's response was disproportionate.

I'm having trouble seeing how any good has come out of it for anybody but Russia -- and John McCain's presidential campaign, at least in the eyes of the media.

The CW has been that the foreign policy wouldn't be a central issue of this election. But substantively, the most important issue seems to be foreign policy and its intersection with our energy policy, and the truth is, those are both tightly connected to our economy.

The CW also has been that foreign policy is John McCain's strength, but substantively the thing that frightens me most about John McCain is his foreign policy and his vision of Manifest Destiny gone global.

I think Barack Obama has a real opportunity here to engage with McCain on this question of how McCain handled Georgia. It will be a bit of an uphill battle with the media, but the payoff would be huge: the reversal of what is supposedly John McCain's biggest strength.

McCain has already provided the first target: his admission on Wednesday that he wasn't sure whether Georgia or Russia was to blame.

And I'll be he's not expecting to get any pushback on his handling of this crisis at all. After all, he did get shot down in a fighter jet, and in his view, that's a qualification for being president.