Warning to Obama on the New Cold War by Tom Hayden

[Better Believe It]

Warning to Obama on the New Cold War
by Tom Hayden
The Nation
August 21, 2008

.... the same Republican neocons who fabricated the reasons for going to war in Iraq are back, and now they have been paid to trigger a new cold war with Russia that benefits John McCain. These are dangerous, expensive unwinnable games being played with American lives to benefit Republican politicians and their oil company friends.

This should be a red line for peace movement supporters of Barack Obama. We can live to fight another time on his proposals on Afghanistan and Pakistan. We can learn to set aside his espousals of sending more troops into those quagmires down the road. After all, we cannot play into McCain's game plan, not with the Supreme Court at stake and a stronger-than-Obama Democratic majority poised to take over Congress. But this new cold war is now heating up by the day, and Obama is likely to be its first political victim. It is even possible that McCain, alerted to the danger, will propose a "diplomatic solution"--after he has squeezed as much benefit out of the cold war revival that he can, to be resumed after he becomes President and tries to incorporate the Ukraine into NATO.

If Obama had a paid lobbyist for a foreign country on his Senate staff, what would the Republican outcry be?

At the very least, Obama can stop going out of his way to celebrate McCain as a great American war hero, which only reinforces McCain's strongest rationale for victory. And Obama's surrogates might delicately suggest that McCain shoots before he thinks. McCain was the pointman pushing the neoconservative war against "Islamo-fascism," centered in Baghdad, months before the Bush Administration revealed its intentions. While Obama urged caution about a "dumb war," McCain was supporting Ahmad Chalabi's misleading assertions about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that didn't exist.

Please read the entire article but especially the sections concerning McCain's foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/hayden2