Georgia on My Mind

This was the title of a recent Tom Friedman editorial in the New York Times. His basic question was "Why are we borrowing $1 Billion dollars from the Chinese to send it to the country of Georgia and not the state of Georgia?" I would also like to ask "Where does Bush and Condi Rice get the $1 Billion to send?" I thought Congress controlled the purse strings? As a taxpayer, I am continually dismayed about a militaristic foreign policy that seeks to provoke Russia and carelessly spreads money from the US Treasury around like it was peanut butter. What happened to the Republican notion which Bush often cites that this is the taxpayer's money and not the government's? What could be the purpose of sending the Vice President and his expensive entourage to visit the region except for the deliberate provocation of Russia when he fails to visit Russia to negotiate anything? Perhaps they forget that Russia still has a nuclear arsenal and if the world is to be safe in the 21st century, we must collaborate with the Russians to secure loose nukes. Or maybe they forgot about the fact that Russia is a prime energy provider to our friends in Western Europe? Further, their call to include Georgia and other former Soviet Republics in NATO is not only needlessly provocative, but reckless. A little known provision of the NATO Charter requires all members to come to the defense of any member that is attacked. While these former Soviet states are perhaps nascent democracies, they are very unstable. Do they intend to have America and Western Europe sucked into a thermonuclear war on the whim of someone like the Georgian president or even Putin if he decides to make another a border incursion? I am by no means condoning the Russian incursion, but do we really want to surrender our foreign policy to an autopilot response mechanism? And what about the missiles in Poland to protect us against an imaginary threat from Iran who currently has no nuclear weapons or missiles with the range to reach Poland let alone the United States. Could it be that this is only another needless provocation spurred on by the Military-Industrial complex to line their pockets with money from the US Treasury? More money that we have to borrow from China? For the US to compete and thrive in the 21st century, we need something more than a throw-back to Cold War era confrontation. We need a well thought out global strategy that puts the real interests of the US and our global partners ahead of knee jerk confrontation and the special interests. Let's invest in the state of Georgia first. That's putting America First.