Steve Burns: Two wars not enough?

Updated 9/15 (updates below)

Vice President Cheney was in Georgia this week, offering $1 billion in aid and repeating a long-standing U.S. commitment to push for NATO membership for the country.

Georgia had recently been overrun by Russian troops after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had sent his own army into the territory of South Ossetia, a region on the border between Russia and Georgia that had maintained its autonomous status since the last armed conflict over the territory in 1991.

Now that his army has been routed, it's clear the Saakashvili's attack was a disastrous blunder, and it's hard to imagine what he could have been thinking. Saakashvili was elected on a nationalist program of "taking back" the autonomous territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which many Georgians believe should be part of Georgia, but his attempt to actually follow through on this promise was reckless in the extreme, and thousands of people in both South Ossetia and Georgia have paid for his recklessness with their lives.

Which brings us back to Cheney and his eagerness to push NATO membership for Georgia. Expanding NATO right up to the borders of Russia has been a dream of Cheney and his fellow "neoconservatives" since the fall of the Soviet Union. If they had gotten their way, and Georgia had been a member of NATO at the time of Saakashvili's attack on South Ossetia and the resulting Russian counter-attack, the United States and other NATO members could have found themselves facing a treaty obligation to come to Georgia's defense. Instead of being entangled in two disastrous wars - in Iraq and Aghanistan - the U.S. could have found itself in three wars, one them with Russia, a nuclear-armed former superpower.

But did that prospect give Cheney, or anyone else in our Executive branch, cause to rethink the "expand NATO" program? Of course not. Three trillion dollars and more than four thousand American lives and more than a million Iraqi and Afghan lives squandered in our current wars produced absolutely no hesitancy to push our country into a possible third war.

But Cheney doesn't appear to be alone in his lack of concern about the potential for engaging our country in yet another war. Both John McCain and Barack Obama were quick to take sides in a squabble halfway around the world over a territory whose name most Americans cannot pronounce. McCain was the most bellicose, saying, "we can't turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people", but Obama was not far behind, promising to "renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can curb Russian aggression."

For both candidates, a decades-long ethnic conflict whose most recent flare-up was actually prompted by Georgian aggression gets reduced to a cartoonish need to stand up to "Russian aggression."

And, while McCain assured us that he would "work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War", both his statements and Obama's made clear that cold-war habits die hard.

There really are no brakes on the American drive to empire. No matter how great a price we pay to purchase it, experience teaches our rulers nothing. And let's be clear that this is really a problem - a compulsion, really - that infects our ruling elites, and not the public at large. Although it's a little-reported fact, 76% of Americans believe the U.S. should not be playing the role of global policeman. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether "policeman" is an accurate description of our role in the world, even when our role of meddling in others affairs is put in that benign light, less than one-quarter of Americans think we should be playing that role.

And yet, despite this overwhelming consensus on the part of the American people that we should be less involved in disputes like the one over South Ossetia, there exists an iron-clad bipartisan consensus among our rulers in Washington that we must come to the rescue of plucky little Georgia, no matter the cost.

In the end, I suppose constraints will have to be imposed on us from the outside. Perhaps cooler heads in Europe might impede the U.S. drive to expand NATO. Perhaps our foreign creditors, who now support the mountain of debt produced by our "all war, all the time" policies, may finally call in their chips and tell us that they're not willing to finance yet another military adventure. We should all pray that this happens, and happens soon, because this election year is showing us that our political system is not capable of self-restraint.

UPDATE: I'm shocked to learn that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times agrees with me.

UPDATE II: In an interview with ABC news' Charles Gibson, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sara Palin advocated NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, while admitting that this may obligate the U.S. to go to war with Russia:

When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia, Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help."

UPDATE III: Ever heard of the 1994 NATO Participation Act? Or the 2002 Gerald B. H. Solomon Freedom Consolidation Act? Both of these bills, passed without debate by both houses of Congress, signed into law by a Democratic President (Bill Clinton) and a Republican President (George W. Bush) made it the policy of the United States to treat "countries emerging from communist domination" as de facto allies, even though no formal decision had been made on their applications to the NATO club - while also pushing for full NATO membership for those countries. The bills also allowed for weapons sales and the stationing of U.S. military advisors in countries right up to the Russian border. The step-by-step expansion of the U.S. empire proceeds apace, with no need to consult - or even inform - the public. A "bipartisan consensus" ensures there is no debate about this extremely risky program of expansion, and a compliant media ensures the public is in the dark, at least until we're dragged into another war.

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