By Patrick J. Buchanan
He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.
But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.
He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.
From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.
What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.
Scheunemann came close to succeeding.
Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.
U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?
Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.
That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality — namely, that Russia’s control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.
If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.
Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.
The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the “near abroad” when the Soviet Union broke apart.
Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.
This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.
Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp.
The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.
Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?
Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … a free people ought to be constantly awake,” Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.
Peace and Justice Post 
Making a Killing in Iraq: John McCain and the Telecoms
September 2, 2008Nikolas Kozloff | Counterpunch, Sep 1, 2008
It’s no secret that John McCain has been a longtime friend of the telecom industry. Indeed, the Arizona Senator has had important historic ties to big corporations like AT&T, MCI and Qualcomm. In return for their financial contributions, McCain, who partly oversees the telecommunication industry in the Senate, has acted to protect and look out for the political and economic interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill.
Such connections are well known, yet few have paused to consider how Iraq fits into the wider jigsaw puzzle. Prior to the war in Iraq, McCain was one of the biggest boosters of the invasion. While it’s unclear whether the telecoms actually lobbied McCain on this score, they certainly benefited under the subsequent occupation.
To get a sense of the sheer scope of McCain’s incestuous relationship with the telecoms, one need only log on to the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics. In the 1998 electoral cycle, AT&T gave $34,000 to McCain. In the 2000 cycle, the telecom giant provided $69,000, in 2002 $61,000, in 2004 $39,000, in 2006 $29,000 and in 2008 $187,000. Over the course of his career, AT&T has been McCain’s second largest corporate backer.
What’s more, AT&T has donated handsomely to McCain’s International Republican Institute (IRI), a private/public organization that carries out the far right’s foreign policy agenda in Iraq and elsewhere (for more on McCain and his relationship with the IRI, see my previous column, “Promoting Iraqi Occupation For ‘a Million Years,’ McCain and The International Republican Institute,” June 9, 2008. In 2006, the company gave the IRI $200,000. AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris declined to elaborate on why the international telecommunications provider wrote a big check. “AT&T contributes to a variety of charitable organizations,” he said flippantly.
If all that money was not enough to secure the Arizona Senator’s allegiance, AT&T may also count on an army of lobbyists who are now allied to the McCain campaign. Take for example campaign adviser Charlie Black, whose lobbying firm BKSH has represented AT&T for the past decade. Then there’s Mark Buse, McCain’s Senate Chief of Staff, who worked as a lobbyist for AT&T Wireless from 2002 to 2005.
Other companies such as MCI and Qualcomm have also played a role in the Arizona politician’s Senate career. Take for instance Tom Loeffler, McCain’s campaign co-chairman and former Congressman of Texas. Loeffler, through his lobbying firm Loeffler Group, has represented Qualcomm since 1999. All told, Qualcomm employees, spouses and political action committees have given tens of thousands of dollars to the McCain campaign. Meanwhile Kirck Blalock, a McCain campaign fundraiser, lobbied MCI from 2002 to 2005 through his firm Fierce, Blalock and Isakowitz.
Though McCain routinely derides the influence of “special interest lobbyists,” his ties to the telecom lobbyists undermine any such claims. Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade.
McCain is a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Arizona Senator has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation. McCain’s efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services have won him praise from industry executives. In the late 1990s, the Arizona Senator wrote the FCC, urging the agency to give serious consideration to the idea of allowing AT&T and MCI to enter the long-distance market. Four months later, AT&T wrote a check for $25,800 to McCain.
If that was not enough, high-up McCain officials such as Charlie Black secretly lobbied Congress to approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against the telecoms for assisting the U.S. intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance programs. McCain himself became an “unqualified” supporter of telecom immunity, claiming in a statement to the National Review that “neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate.” Needless to say, McCain voted in favor of granting amnesty to AT&T and other telecoms at exactly the time that his close adviser Black was taking money from AT&T to influence Congress on its behalf.
Making a Killing in Iraq
Even as McCain was lobbying hard for the Telecom industry in the late 1990s, the Arizona Senator worked overtime to build up the case for war in the Middle East. McCain served as the “honorary co-chair” of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group which helped push for official government as well as public support for the invasion of Iraq after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Continued . . .
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Tags:AT&T, conections with telecom industry, financial backers, invasion of Iraq, John McCain, Kirck Blalock, lobbyist, MCI and Qualcomm
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