May I suggest something for the last two paragraphs along the lines of:

"Now, at a time when McCain's Presidential election campaign is floundering,  Saakashvili launches an attack on South Ossetia killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians and drawing the inevitable Russian military action in response.  The McCain campaign's response has been just as swift and brutal in using this incident to conjure up a red scare.

October Surprise from Saakashvili and his paid lobbyist?"

This way, the McCain campaign is rhetorically put on par with the Russian "aggression" that has been so successfully demonised, without quite doing it semantically. It's a cheap psychological trick, but it seems to work for the bad guys.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.