From The Washington Post
By David Ignatius

It was February 2006 in Munich, and John McCain’s eyes were flashing with the mischievous spark that comes when he’s about to fire a verbal rocket. “I’ve got a zinger coming,” he told me, referring to a speech on Russia he would give a few hours later at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy.

And McCain did indeed deliver a zinger. He blasted Vladimir Putin for “the pursuit of autocracy at home and abroad” — and then urged that Russia be excluded from the G-8 summit of industrialized nations. For good measure, he included a call for Georgia, already a thorn in Russia’s side, to join NATO.

McCain’s 2006 speech made news, as he knew it would. So did an address in Munich the night before from Georgia’s emotional president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He recalled how he had cried the night the Berlin Wall fell — and then pleaded for Western support for Georgia’s efforts to recover the renegade province of South Ossetia and end what he called the “cancer of separatism.”

Now that Russia has invaded Georgia, McCain can point to that speech and argue, “I told you so.” And it’s true enough that the Arizona Republican was early to warn that Putin’s Russia was heading in a dangerous direction and that the West should be vigilant. But what sticks in my memory of that day in Munich was the flash in McCain’s eyes before he made his provocative speech.

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.

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