Did McCain's hot temper help create the Georgia crisis?

From David Igantius

McCain likes zingers. We've all seen that mischievous look -- just before he shot a quip or sarcastic one-liner at GOP rivals such as former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. It's one of his appealing qualities, but in this case it worries me. Zingers don't make good foreign policy. They embolden friends and provoke adversaries -- and in the Georgia crisis, that has proved to be a deadly combination.

In the aftermath of the Georgia war, many commentators have argued that the mercurial Saakashvili walked into a trap by launching an attack Aug. 7 on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali -- providing the pretext for the brutal Russian response. That conclusion emerges from a meticulous reconstruction by The Post's Peter Finn.

So what encouraged Saakashvili to make his reckless gamble? Partly it was the ambivalent policy of the Bush administration, which told the Georgian leader one month that "We always fight for our friends" (as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in July in Tbilisi about Georgia's bid to join NATO) and the next month cautioned restraint. And partly it was cheerleading from the pro-Georgia lobby, in which McCain has been one of the loudest voices.

Let's put aside the fact that McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has in fact been a lobbyist for Georgia. In his own feisty comments in recent months, McCain encouraged Georgians to believe America would back them up in a crisis. That expectation was naive, and it was wrong to encourage it. It was especially wrong to give a volatile leader such as Saakashvili what he evidently imagined was an American blank check.

In the post-Cold War world, small countries often get into fights they can't finish -- hoping that big powers will come to their rescue.