It was almost exactly ten years ago that President Bill Clinton was accused of "wagging the dog". Two U.S. embassies in Africa, in Nairobi and in Dar Es Salaam were bombed and the attacks were quickly linked to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Clinton responded by launching cruise missile attacks against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan.
Of course, this was in the middle of the ludicrous so-called "scandal" about Monica Lewinsky and Clinton was accused of attempting to divert attention from that to a foreign crisis. When the attacks apparently failed to take out terrorist targets, despite their having been recommended by military experts, the press was giddy with charges of "wag the dog". There was even a movie that came out later entitled, if I recall correctly, "Wag the Dog".
So what's going on now? The appearance of foreign crises that maybe are designed to help the GOP candidate.
I certainly agree that Clinton did a lousy job of explaining the retaliation. He might have taken the opportunity of educating the American people about Al Qaeda, since on the fateful day of the 9-11-01 attacks, most of us were unfamiliar with the group or its leadership.
And not many Americans realize that Clinton's people warned Bush and his crowd in January of 2001 about the danger posed by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Even fewer seem to know that it was Bush who failed to respond to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. (That attack occurred in October of 2000 and it was supposedly not linked to Al Qaeda in time for a response, or it was thought that a response should ideally be done by whoever the new President would be--a critical mistake. Had Gore made the attack an issue, and yet lost the election, Bush's failures in 2001 to take terrorism seriously might have led to his being thrown out of office in 2004. Instead, somehow the public still trusts the GOP on anti-terrorism and foreign policy.)
But what exactly is happening now? We are seeing a situation that is not dissimilar to a "Monroe Doctrine" problem in the Russian sphere of influence and there seems to be ample evidence that Bush and Cheney are involved in creating a phony international "crisis" in Georgia.
Am I just too cynical to think this is an effort to boost the GOP candidate and it's done in a way that makes it really difficult for Obama to respond? Or why shouldn't the Democrats just open fire and accuse the GOP of negligence in 2001, recklessness in 2003, and more of the same with McCain?
Just what vital interests do we have in Georgia, as opposed to Zimbabwe, to take one example. For that matter, what vital interests did we have in Iraq and what vital interests do we have in Afghanistan? There was a very convincing op-ed in the NYT about that recently.
I'd like to see Obama emphasize more the idea that we have plenty of needs at home and should not be spending money and treasure in places where for whatever reason, they cannot get their act together. And in these oil-rich Arab countries, it's not like they have any other resources; they have to sell their oil on the open market.
Let's not forget that both George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower warned us about this kind of stuff--probably something most Americans don't know about.