Two recent headlines made me cringe.
"Afghanistan, the good war" and "Russia plays chess, America plays Monopoly."
They beg questions from this weary American about the Georgian-Russian conflict and the U.S. role in it.
Are the world's nations mere pawns, places to buy, sell and sell out? Do their people have any say in what is happening?
One of the hardest things about living in the world today is knowing who to believe and what to do when violence erupts in a faraway place where you know people. The Republic of Georgia is such a place for me. I was in Georgia in 1989 as a reporter covering the Grand Traverse delegation that traveled there in the days of "perestroika" to establish a sister-county relationship with Mtskheta region near Tbilisi.
For the past two weeks I've been sorting thoughts about this growing hotspot.
Initially, I wondered if violence between Georgia and Russia might be another pre-election gimmick of saber rattling designed to make John McCain look mature and experienced on the stage of world politics.
But cynicism only stops me from looking deeper. So does writing off Russians, Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians as nationalistic crazies on the fringe of oil-rich Central Asia.
The more I read, the more I arrive at the same question: Was Georgia's American-educated president, Mikheil Saakashvili, being reckless when he launched the Aug. 7 attack on South Ossetia, or did he really expect the United States to back him up?
I can see where Saakashvili might get that idea.
One of John McCain's advisers is Randy Scheunemann, a former Washington lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia with a long resume in oil politics. Barack Obama's chief political foreign policy director is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a consultant to BP when it built its pipelines across Georgia and who served as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who's long advocated a containment policy for Russia and China.
Georgia has no oil, but it is the conduit for pipelines that transport oil from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia to the Black Sea, Turkey and Europe.
I think the United States needs to admit its responsibility if American officials and strategists "played" Saakashvili in the "grand chessboard" of Eurasian politics that Brzezinski once wrote about. If so, it backfired and unveiled what's really at stake. McCain and Obama need to be asked some hard questions, too, about their "advisers."
This is another battle about oil and who will control its flow and politics in Eurasia and Europe. It's been brought to us by the same sponsors who delivered Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don't want to go there -- again.
Loraine Anderson can be reached at 933-1468 or landerson@record-eagle.com
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