|
McCain wants Russia thrown out of G8
Russia should be barred from the G8 group of powerful nations for trying to "bully" its neighbors and cutting political freedoms, Republican White House hopeful John McCain said in an essay released Monday. I can think of a couple of other reasons, too. One of them is that they have no significant economy besides exporting the tools and technology required to wage war and terror. Writing for an upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs journal, the Arizona senator also warned America could not afford a "historic loss" to Islamic extremists in Iraq and added the war could not be "wished away." "We see in Russia diminishing political freedoms, a leadership dominated by a clique of former intelligence officers, efforts to bully democratic neighbors, such as Georgia, and attempts to manipulate Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas," McCain wrote. "We need a new Western approach to this revanchist Russia. "We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia." McCain said that the West should tell Moscow that NATO's doors remained open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom. Once the presumed front-runner of the Republican establishment, McCain, a Vietnam war hero, downsized his operation early this year after a fundraising crunch and now lags behind other top Republicans like former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and ex-governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney in the polls. He was also hurt politically by his support for President George W. Bush's Iraq war "surge" strategy and doomed bid to overhaul US immigration laws. Hopefully supporing W's surge won't be such a burden after all. In his article, he condemned "years of mismanagement and failure" in Iraq, but argued there was no alternative to pressing on with the conflict. "The consequences of failure would be horrific: a historic loss at the hands of Islamic extremists, who after having defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq will believe the world is going their way." And McCain also took aim at Democrats, who are pledging to quickly start bringing US troops from Iraq if they are elected in November 2008. "The war in Iraq cannot be wished away and it is a miscalculation of historic magnitude to believe that the consequences of failure will be limited to one administration or one party," McCain wrote. They won't. They just want to harvest the ignorant vote is all. Posted by: gorb 2007-10-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=202649 |