During part one of Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, she did more than cavalierly toss out the possibility of war with Russia. Palin tipped her hand to the rationale, and Daily Kos diarist Fishgrease caught it:
Putin will also see another statement in Palin's interview, clearly a gaff that American media have missed so far:
His [Putin's] mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.
Russia must not be allowed to control energy supplies coming from and through Russia.
That is one hell of a radical announcement. We all know she didn't come up with it on her own. Palin was coached to think this policy wise by Bush advisors; in light of its magnitude, it's a good bet her coaches meant for her to play the full scope of it closer to the vest rather than spill every one of the beans to Russia.
I'll tell you what Vladimir Putin knows today, that he only suspected to be true before Palin's interview: This is a current U.S. foreign policy objective and Bush advisors were dispatched to Palin's side to ensure ideological continuity through a McCain-Palin administration. Putin now knows exactly what they want, why they want it, and how far they're willing to go to get it.
How would it work?
Under the Bush Doctrine, the U.S. adopted high-horse imperialism as its sole province. Bruce Nussbaum, writing for BusinessWeek, characterized it this way:
The Bush Doctrine, as expressed in the report, has three basic tenets. First, the U.S. is free to take preemptive action against terrorists and states that have weapons of mass destruction. Second, no country or combination of countries will ever be allowed to challenge U.S. military superiority. Third, unilateral measures are better than international treaties and organizations in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. In short, the Bush Doctrine declares that America will no longer be constrained by the traditional norms and rules of the international community.
This gross mutation of Manifest Destiny is driven by contempt and greed and it does not limit itself to territorial expansion for geo-strategic security; the Bush Doctrine asserts the U.S.'s absolute right to global dominance.
Central to understanding why this may lead to war with Russia, Palin's clumsy revelation points directly to the intersection of Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and his neoconservative allies.
Neoconservatives need the specter of a boogeyman capable of inspiring nationalist hostility among Americans (so that justifications can be made to engage the U.S. military) and the corporations that helped Cheney develop our national energy policy need guaranteed access to plentiful fossil fuel and uranium resources. Russia fits both bills.
War with Russia may be a nightmare for most American citizens and U.S. Armed Forces to contemplate, but it would be a neoconservative dream come true. Remember, these people don't hold us in high regard and they don't acknowledge their responsibility to tell us the truth. They won't tell you that the original Bush Doctrine is alive and well under seeming fluidity and palatable rhetoric. They won't tell you that Cheney's Energy Task Force had to be working off the underlying presumption that rightful dominance entitles the United States to lay claim to all natural resources and control the profits derived from them.
We know that McCain believes in the Bush Doctrine, and has for some time. We also know that McCain has adopted Cheney's energy policy. It seems clear to me that McCain understands the thrust of what's expected of him as a result of these converging objectives because he recently promised, "there will be other wars." With all this in mind, it's little wonder Russia had no patience for the officious intermeddling of neoconservatives in Georgia.
Under the auspices of defending democracy and free-markets, the Bush administration and McCain's campaign cynically seized on Georgia and began priming the American public to sanction more of the same disastrous policies.
McCain's hand has been tipped. We can't say that we didn't have a chance to connect the dots ahead of time. Whether or not Americans will let this lead to catastrophe is largely up to us.