Return to the Cold War for John McCain

They obviously don't teach Cold War history at the law schools at Columbia University in New York or George Washington in the nation's capital, otherwise Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, who attended both institutions, would have thought twice about encouragement from the US for his ill-fated attack on South Ossetia a week ago.

Saakashvili could have read vivid accounts of broadcasts, via the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe, encouraging the Hungarians in 1956 to believe that if they rose against the Soviet occupier Nato troops would race to their aid. The CIA's director of operations, Frank Wisner, fervently hoped for intervention, but President Eisenhower never had the slightest intention of providing it. Wisner was devastated and suffered a breakdown, ultimately committing suicide.

Another lesson for Saakashvili from this

period of savage Cold War tension came in the dawn of the Kennedy administration when Cuban exiles, seeking to topple Castro in the Bay of Pigs landing, waited vainly for US air support which they thought the CIA had guaranteed. Kennedy declined to make such an order and the furious exiles claimed they had been stabbed in the back. Some think they took revenge with the assassination of JFK nearly three years later.

There are well-known Americans with an identifiable motive for encouraging Saakashvili to believe that his onslaught on South Ossetia would receive support more substantial than some pro forma quacks of protest from George Bush, dragging his eyes from the comely swimmers and beach volleyball players in Beijing to the anodyne text placed in font of him by his advisors.

Republican contender John McCain needs bare-knuckle confrontations with America's enemies. In such eyeball-to-eyeball crises he can strut before the cameras as the seasoned warrior with 'experience', unafraid to lead America to the very brink of