Conventional wisdom has it that if the economy is the main issue, the Democrats win. If foreign policy and national security are the big issues, then Republicans win.
Currently, the economy dominates the news, but we have a Republican president, and George W. Bush certainly could help his party by stirring up a foreign crisis to shift attention away from Wall Street.
But where?
There’s his old “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran and North Korea. But we’ve invaded and occupied Iraq, and we keep hearing that the surge has succeeded. So if there’s big trouble in Iraq, it won’t help the GOP brand.
Iran and North Korea appear to be persisting with their nuclear ambitions, but those things take time to develop and can’t be counted on to generate an instant crisis to swing voters toward John McCain.
Looking elsewhere, South America has plenty of leaders that don’t like us, the main one being Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Bush might arrange for some American drug- enforcement airplane to fly over an area where it’s certain to be shot at, then claim that our flag has been sullied, and it’s time to rally against this threat to the American way of life.
But it’s hard to imagine that anyone, even the professional GOP apologists at Fox News, would take Peru, Colombia or Venezuela seriously as a threat to our national security. Granted, they would try as soon as they got issued the talking points, but it’s a long ways from being a sure-fire move.
Better to look elsewhere, then. The Republic of Georgia recently suffered an invasion by Russian soldiers, leading to the effective loss of some of its territory. Georgia had wanted to join NATO, and if it had, then under the treaty we would have been compelled to respond to the Russian attack.
However, Georgia isn’t in NATO, the invasion is old news from nearly two months ago, and if we didn’t get riled up then, we likely won’t now.
Pakistan has possibilities, though. Some witnesses say Pakistani forces have fired at American military helicopters and drone aircraft coming into the South Waziristan region in search of al-Qaeda terrorist camps.
There have been official denials, of course, since Pakistan is formally an ally in the War on Terror. So it’s not a good time to elevate this one to a major international issue.
But there is a place where everything could fall together for a contrived crisis. The polar ice cap has been shrinking, making more of the Arctic Ocean navigable. That means more potential off-shore oil-drilling areas.
Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin might still have a good working relationship, since Bush once claimed to have “a sense of his soul.”
So they could arrange for Russia to send oil-exploration ships into some portion of the Arctic Ocean that might be claimed as Alaskan waters. Gov. Sarah Palin can exercise her authority as commander in chief by calling out the Alaska National Guard to defend the state’s oil resources. The Russians can respond with a destroyer or two, and we send up a few Coast Guard cutters. The charade can escalate through most of October, with Russia eventually backing off.
Thus national security and energy development return to the front pages, Palin gets some serious foreign policy credibility, and Republicans win.
Just remember, if anything this bizarre happens, you read it here first, and you shouldn’t take it seriously no matter how much they say our national security is threatened.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
