Worth Reading: How Ukraine's Stunning Wartime Achievements Are Spun As Disaster By The GOP
Why are Republicans upset about the significant weakening of America's strategic adversary?
Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash
The Biden administration, then, has done three things simultaneously by arming Ukraine, all of which MAGA bangs on about in advocating the United States “defund” Ukraine. It has created and is still creating new manufacturing jobs at home while breathing new life into an obsolescent or sclerotic American defense sector. It has cajoled ambivalent or tentative NATO allies into taking more responsibility for their own security and shouldering more of the burden for a European nation at war. It has radically diminished the conventional threat posed against the United States by Russia – a threat previously anatomized by Donald Trump’s own Defense Department – thereby freeing up resources, attention, and bandwidth for deterring China, the other state power posing such a threat. All this without the deployment of a single American soldier to a combat zone or the loss of a single American life overseas. You might even say the vanguard of the Republican Party should by now be “tired of winning;” instead, they insist, getting everything they ever claimed to have wanted is presented as a colossal defeat.
by framersqool:
By way of disclaimers here, firstly, it poses a significant challenge to my self-respect to cite anything from any source with anything positive to say about the Biden administration. I suppose that, as the lifelong clown parade of one comically inept and psychotically ignorant chief executive after another has proceeded throughout all the years of my life span, in each one's case, there probably had to be a time or two when they did something that made some modicum of sense, even if by accident. That's about all the credit I am willing to afford to the current one on this or any other topic.
The other side of that position, however, is that it has been easy to observe that for all the seeming gravitas of the USA's substantial domination of the aid parade headed Kyiv's way, closer analysis by a great many sources has shown all along that for all its bulk, the net intent behind American aid to Ukraine still looks in both form and content like the USA buying its way into yet another frozen conflict in someone else's country, and once again one where the idea of actual outright victory over an adversary never seems to have been any part of the formula for determining the American role.
But the fact remains that the USA has indeed set the standard, at least in purely quantitative terms, for the truly astonishing amount of foreign assistance to Ukraine's war effort these past two years.
This article does a good job of revealing the hypocrisy behind the GOP's predictable but poorly thought-out resistance to the Ukraine policies of the current administration. For all its self-admiration for being the party of Ronald Reagan and standing up to evil empires and whatnot, there has never been such an opportunity as this within my lifetime for the USA to do exactly that and actually (for once) see comprehensive success as its outcome and all without a single American service member coming under fire.
That the Biden entourage has instead chosen to be so hesitant and restrained toward declaring the complete restoration of Ukraine's 1991 territories as the goal and unambiguously, unapologetically engineering its military aid toward that end is another set of arguments in this context.
But all Western media handwringing aside, the plain reality is that Ukraine has undeniably somehow managed to stop such a mighty military machine in its tracks, hold a 1000km frontline for over a year, gain back a not-insubstantial amount of its lands in the process, and inflict staggering losses on both personnel and equipment upon one of the most feared military establishments in the world (with or without good reason, which is still another set of arguments), and all without a navy or anything even resembling air superiority, while still managing to maintain some semblance of law and order and a functioning economy behind its lines, against such odds.
And all this is what the party of Reagan is content to call a disaster.
In a just-sayin' context, if South Vietnamese forces in the 1960s had been able to achieve even a tenth of what the AFU has, in less than two years, without a single American soldier, sailor, or airman being placed in harm's way, the entire history of the United States and even the world since then would have taken a whole different direction.
Also, bearing in mind that it takes some self-distancing for me to be willing to assess these events in this way, given my inclination toward absolute pacifism and radical isolationism (if anyone were asking me to establish American foreign policy, which they aren't), I hope you can recognize that what I am doing here by recommending this piece is offering you a very well-made case to review, even if one that I find so problematic to embrace in full closest to my own heart.
framersqool
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
It bears mention, for the sake of clarity, that if I had ever retained any faith in the weasel-worded, false-dichotomied lying points of either criminal cartel maintaining this permanent chokehold on American politics, the conduct of each during this invasion of Ukraine by Russia has left me absolutely disgusted with them both.
Here are two purely self-serving and extremely powerful super-factions, whose daily activities and claims leave me so unwilling to trust either of them as though they were acting in anything even resembling good faith, while both are so detached from reality as to be motivated by little more than sniping away at the other side with meaningless rhetoric they don't even believe themselves, that I am left wondering why any American in good conscience could ever willingly grant power to either of them.
I've spent the past fifteen years in Oklahoma, where the full-nelson OKGOP monopoly on governing powers is so entrenched and hidebound that 'rule of law' has long since become a kind of joke in bad taste, and generally suspected of probably being one made up by liberals. The comfortable and stable elite of upper-middle-class evangelical conservatives who run this place seem to be motivated by no passion more impressive than college football stats and sleazy tax dodges, while daily injecting heavy doses of far-right talk-radio so irritatingly alien to reality that one wonders how any self-respecting grownup could ever have allowed themselves to be subjected to such ridiculous and frankly stupid propaganda at all.
Meanwhile, throughout the full-scale war in Ukraine, I've done my patient best to hear out one western campus intellectual after another reciting the now-standardized sermon to the effect that Ukraine's war is important because Ukraine is fighting to uphold something called 'liberal democracy', whatever that means. Ultimately I have to take this silly posture as being presented in the same degree of bad faith and rank ignorance by western intellectuals as whatever it is their 'conservative' rivals claim to believe in.
From where I sit, I can hardly distinguish between one entrenched upscale elite primarily obsessed with college ball and sleazy tax dodges, and the other, suffice it to say.
I've been saying all along that Ukraine's second-worst enemy in this war is the current DC regime itself: for all its talk about some fairy tale of 'liberal democracy' as being at the heart of Ukraine's existential struggle to survive at all as a sovereign and independent state enjoying full autonomy over all its internationally-recognized (as of 1991) territories, one is hard-pressed to find any indication in DC Ukraine-war policies to suggest the slightest inclination toward facilitating the Kyiv state or the Ukrainian war effort toward achieving this aim. Whatever DC's current elite is after instead, by forcing Ukraine to fight this war without air superiority or any other strategic advantage such as long-range weaponry or NATO-doctrine overwhelming firepower on the ground, is anyone's guess.
On the other hand, after these fifteen years spent seeing firsthand the results of these MAGA morons having been for so long left to their own devices in running Oklahoma, what any of them actually believes in, aside from their idiotic superstitions about some imminent 'rapture' coming along and rendering all human conflicts in the modern era moot while some right-leaning deity whisks away all the Good Guys to some better place... I've given up even trying to guess.
How did we let any of these willfully-ignorant, self-admiring sociopaths end up telling us what to do?
And what has to happen in order for both factions of them to ooze back into whatever fetid swamp of untruth and vicious advantage-seeking they crawled out of, and leave us to manage our own affairs for ourselves?