Coincident with Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Georgia this week, President Bush announced Wednesday that the United States would be providing that nation $1 billion in additional aid to help it recover from its war with Russia last month.

The new help to Georgia will serve to further enrage Russia, thus raising a number of questions. The first is, why, in terms of Georgia itself, is America doing this? Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has suggested that the Bush administration put Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili up to sending troops into South Ossetia, with the goal of creating a foreign affairs crisis to strengthen the political marketability of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain as stronger on national security affairs than Sen. Barack Obama.

If Mr. Saakashvili thought that America would ride to the rescue when Russia predictably came back with a very strong military reaction and Washington did nothing except talk, then the Georgian president may feel that the Bush administration now owes him something for his country's having had its tail caught in the mower.

It is hard to imagine that Mr. Bush wishes to further poison U.S. relations with Russia by providing Georgia another $1 billion in aid on top of the already $1.8 billion it has received since independence. Mr. Bush says it is economic and humanitarian aid, but everyone knows that aid is fungible. What the United States gives Georgia for nonmilitary purposes replaces money that Georgia can then use for military purposes. U.S. military aid to Georgia is estimated to have amounted to $21 million in equipment and training last year.

Then there is the American taxpayer. Why, exactly, should the United States be borrowing another $1 billion in deficit spending to make up to Georgia for the damage it suffered when it provoked its huge, dangerous neighbor?

Fortunately, some $430 million of the aid won't go to Georgia unless the Congress approves. That body acts slowly on foreign aid requests in the best of times, which the final months before elections definitely are not. Second, it seems unlikely that a Democratic-majority Congress would be interested in approving the Bush administration's payoff to Georgia for its futile attempt at arson in the Caucasus.

This final-months enterprise needs to be shelved. It probably will be unless Mr. McCain wins in November. It is his chief foreign affairs adviser, Randy Scheunemann, whose firm worked as a lobbyist for Georgia for years.