McCain Got It Right When U. S., U. N. and Obama Got It Wrong

“Russia policy failure: U.S. diplomacy no match for Putin strategy,” says Bill Gertz

This World Tribune article by Bill Gertz titled “Russia policy failure: U.S. diplomacy no match for Putin strategy” opines as follows:

“The Georgia-Russia military clash over the breakaway region of Ossetia is being viewed in Washington intelligence circles as a failure of U.S. policy toward Russia, a policy that has relied on the personal diplomacy of President Bush rather than on U.S. national interest.

Bush has stated repeatedly in the past that he believes world problems can be worked out when leaders have good personal relations and he specifically stated that his contact with former Russian President Vladimir Putin was the key to keeping Moscow from becoming a hostile, anti-democratic power.

However, Russia over the past eight years has moved steadily away from democracy and toward anti-democratic authoritarianism. The attacks by Russian strategic bombers and missiles on Georgia represent the first real post-Soviet threats from Moscow.

The Russian military attacks on Georgia in the aftermath of Georgia’s military incursion into Ossetia, where Russia was covertly backing separatist rebels, are the most visible failure of U.S. policy toward Russia that has been marked by damaging neglect on the part of the White House National Security Council staff, the State Department and to a lesser extent the Pentagon.

State Department officials, in particular, ignored Russia’s slide toward neo-Sovietism, claiming in internal policy papers that Moscow remained committed to pro-U.S., pro-democratic reform policies. These officials failed to recognize that Moscow, based on its opposition to a U.S. missile defense site in central Europe, had shifted dramatically against the United States.

Senior Bush aides, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have expressed publicly that they did not understand Russian opposition to the missile defense site in Poland and Czech Republic.”

Other sources point to U.S. intelligence agencies predicting a Georgian military incursion into Ossetia that would trigger a Russian military response, but the scope and ferocity of the attacks was not anticipated, according to U.S. officials. Accurately assessing the situation Putin pushed the envelope sensing weakness by the U. S. and counting on an ineffective or non existent U. S. resolve, and he got both.

Presidential candidate John McCain immediately got it right. Barack Obama’s response to the Russo-Ossetian War typified an initially tepid U. S. response that encouraged Putin to go farther and be more brutal. Such temerity included a qualified response by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzah who said Aug. 8 at the UN that the United States “deplored” the Russian attacks, short of a harsher diplomatic terminology of condemnation and was among the things that the Kremlin viewed as tacit permission for the attacks.