Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
It’s not a win win for the Ukrainians, who are losing lives. The article shows what’s been said all along: the US doesn’t gaf about Ukraine or it’s people. The US is only involved to make money and to prop up the US’s dying empire.
Eh, we’re not in there for a couple reasons and they all make sense. It would preclude NATO from ever entering because of the non-aggression portion of the agreement, and it would put Russia in a corner where they have to either admit defeat (which putin won’t do) or go nuclear which is bad for everyone but especially bad for Ukraine.
The article in the OP is explicitly talking about US involvement. The US and NATO are ‘in there’. If NATO isn’t in Ukraine, it was hardly ever anywhere.
Arguing that NATO isn’t involved seems to be either disingenuous or naive. It accepts NATO’s PR at face value and in opposition to the practical reality. NATO/the US tends not announce it’s clandestine work in the tabloids or the broadsheets, especially as it happens but it does admit it sometimes, if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Ukraine, it’s not even hidden. They’ve been bragging about how much weaponry they’ve been sending and how much they’ve been involved in training and instructing Ukrainians how to fight.
Was the US involved when it trained and funded Saddam, Bin Laden, or the Contras? Of course it was. Ukraine is another example of how the US gets involved without ‘getting it’s hands dirty’; although I’ve yet to meet anyone IRL who doesn’t think the US has the bloodiest, grimiest hands of all. The only question is whether people think it’s a good thing or a bad thing. The fact of it is not open to dispute.
I’ll struggle to accept any argument that splits hairs over what counts as involvement, I’m afraid. It boils down to semantics without addressing the crux of the issue.
I’m also struggling to see why more visible NATO/US involvement would require Russia to admit defeat until it’s been defeated. Unless you’re implying that NATO would wipe the floor with Russia. That doesn’t seem right for two reasons:
- The best minds and the resources of NATO have been demonstrably unable to stop Russia so far and
- If Russia looks like losing, it has the nuclear option and shit gets real messy real quick and it’s lose-lose for everyone
3rd party involvement and direct engagement are two very different things. The non-aggression agreement, the one that protects and constrains nato members, only cares about engagement, training and arms are a-ok. What member states agreed to is concrete and well defined, not whatever amorphous definition you’re going by here.
The “loose definition” redtea came up with is bonkers.
Additionally, as you say, words have meanings. When people criticise NATO it is as a stand-in for the imperialist world order. It includes the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the ‘international’ courts and rules, and all their elements and capitalist lackeys. You’re making a semantic argument, which misses the crucial point: that NATO and its member states are concerned only with the wealth and power of their bourgeoisie, regardless of Russia.
I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have an agenda, that we can’t have world peace until there are no more imperialists, which includes and is often, in ordinary language, represented by NATO. If you interpret that as support for Russia, there’s not much left for us to discuss.
The nutbag’s definition of NATO includes Russia.
Without aid Ukraine would lose more lives.
Do you honestly believe that? You honestly think that US aid has saved lives in Ukraine? Some surely has but the weapons? Ig it’s not your family and friends in the cross hairs, your fields poisoned with depleted uranium, or your kids’ cross country tracks littered with cluster munitions. You really think the country responsible for embargoes of medical supplies to Palestine, Yemen, and Cuba, to name a few, is sending aid to save lives?
Ukraine is another Kurdistan to the US. The only question is whether it will take the Ukrainians as long as it took the Kurds to learn that the US is nobody’s friend.
Ok, and? Are they doing something wrong? Aren’t we supposed to scold someone when they’re doing bads things, and praise them for doing good things, not just shit on them no matter what?
US involvement is unambiguously a good thing morally and for the people of Ukraine. Any other take would lunacy. So why are you taking time to shit on the US and not the ethnonationalist dictatorship invading a democratic neighbor of theirs? Are your priorities that messed up? America bad? Certainly, but it hurts YOU to have a such narrow minded view geopolitics. The US isn’t always the bad guy.
The US has spent 30+ years shit stirring, dismantling Ukraine, running coups, and undermining Ukraine’s relationships with it’s closest neighbours. Now it’s provoked a war and all gullible liberals can say is the same thing they said about the US contemporaneously with all its other wars.
The article in the OP demonstrates exactly what I and others like me have been saying from the start: the US is not involved to be the good guy, it has no moral high ground; it is only involved to make money, and no number of Ukrainian lives is too great a price to pay for US prosperity. The US is involved to steal as much Ukrainian wealth as possible.
It’s not just the ‘profit’ from selling the weapons (which Ukraine will pay for, not the US, so there’s no benevolence in it but self-interest). Every aid package is another tranche of the same kind of loans that the US has used to loot and privatise the country’s assets for decades. The same thing the US does everywhere. The only difference now is the novelty of trying to physically destroy Russia’s military at the same time.
It’s a bit rich to say that I’m the one with a narrow minded view of geopolitics when you’ve reduced a 30+ year conflict to it’s surface details. Events like this cannot be separated from the political economy or their historical context. It’s clear that liberals still haven’t learned to correct a flaw in their framework that was identified 150 years ago (source otherwise only indirectly relevant):
Some people have dug beneath the appearance of things, whereas others accept them in their inverted form.
Without the US more ukrainians would die and Russia would have overrun them by now and subjugated them into the shitshow they call motherland.
So it’s a win win.
Ask Ukrainians which version they prefer - US involvement or not. Oh wait, it’s pretty clear they prefer the kill rabid bear with Himars version.
The only version they’d like even more is killing bear with ATACMS and F16.
So fuck off tankie.
Ask Ukrainians which version they prefer - US involvement or not.
Yeah there’s just one little problem here fam: the US backed a coup there and installed pro-war neo-nazis in power, there was no question about it left to the Ukrainians.
In the liberal imagination, history started this morning, every morning, unfortunately. Historical context is practically irrelevant to them once they’ve been told which side to pick.
I’m fairly sure that if you asked Ukrainians, there’d be a clear victory for ‘please can everyone stop aiming RPGs at my grandma’s house and my son’s school?’ although I’d expect regional split in the answers. The only people who root for war like this are (if there’s a difference between them) psychopaths, liberals who are far from the frontlines, and fascists.
