If you loved how our goof-off President George Bush delayed sending help to victims of Hurricane Katrina, you’ll really like his sequel. It’s called How I Left the Georgian Republic Stranded and Helped to Re-start the Cold War in the Process.
Honestly, it still amazes me that someone as corrupt as George Bush is at the same time so stupid and grossly incompetent. Usually one characteristic precludes the others.
After all, evil, arrogant people are
usually brilliant. Oh well, chalk it up to sustained cocaine use in
college. In any event, Bush has blundered once again, and this time he
may have undone everything Ronald Reagan did to make the world safe
from Soviet aggression.
Remember when Bush bragged that he had
“looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes” and saw his soul? I am reminded of
the time when, following a meeting with Hitler, Lord Neville
Chamberlain assured his countrymen that Germany was no threat to
England. Perhaps Chamberlain can be forgiven his pre-World War II
naivete. But Bush has no excuse for misreading the intentions of Czar
Vlad. In addition to the lessons of history at his fingertips, our
so-called commander in chief is surrounded by scores of advisors,
including Soviet expert Condi Rice, who should have known that Putin’s
eyes were full of deceptive aggression.
But even if we give
Bush and Rice the benefit of the doubt on the front end, there is no
excuse for America’s delay in putting a halt to Russia’s invasion of
Georgia once it began, and for waiting a week to send in humanitarian
aid. Said Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, “The response has
been inadequate, and the West failed to analyze the Russians’
intentions, and they failed to react promptly to what has been
happening”.
The fact is that Bush is scared of Putin because
he knows that the Russian bully is aware of our weaknesses.
Specifically, Vlad knows that the US military is overextended in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and that Russia is one of our biggest lender nations
that holds substantial ownership over America’s growing debts and
deficits.
That’s why Putin knew he could march into Georgia
without fear of retribution from the West. Now, in addition to
Georgia’s current plight, her former Soviet block brothers in Estonia,
Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine,
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania fear similar invasions in the future.
I’m
not one for policing the world or interfering in internal politics and
civil wars, but the United States helped to dismantle the Soviet Union
so that its satellite nations could be free. If those nations are
attacked by their former oppressors, then we have an obligation to stop
those attacks.
The solution now is to move quickly to admit
Georgia and other similarly situated, vulnerable countries into NATO
where Putin knows they will enjoy the full protection of its collective
membership.
At the same time, we must pull out of Iraq
immediately (where we shouldn’t have gone in the first place, and where
civil strife will never subside), and we should stop the practice of
deficit spending.
This time Russia caught us with our pants
down, and we were unwilling to respond. But if we don’t make some
changes, then next time we might be unable to respond. In terms that
George W can understand, “We just can’t let Vlad be Putin one over on
us again.”
Jim Longworth is the host of “Triad Today,” airing on Fridays at 6:30 a.m. on ABC 45 (cable channel 7) and Sundays at 10 p.m. on WMYV (cable channel 15).
