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Thank you, Professor Richardson. I feel ashamed of the antics by House Republicans. The world is anxious and so are we! There must be a way to get weapons to Ukraine!
President Biden should announce that he plans to send troops immediately to Ukraine for field exercises with the Ukrainian Army. He can do that with the D.o.D. training budget and Congress can not do a damn thing about it. That announcement would almost certainly snap Congress to pass that aid; the troops would never need to go.
This would cost him the next election. This head fake would be fodder for Republicans and the FOX and other MAGA media to blast that Biden was putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. Americans are loath to have American soldiers in another war.
It is a time for courage. Watching Ukraine get slaughtered by fretting when a noisy and noisome minority huffs and puffs will more likely cost President Biden the election. Time to stick it to the fat man rather than to appease the gangster régime; time to call a blustery bluff or two. You know what el Señor Emilio Zapata said: better to die on one's feet than live on his or her knees.
I have to agree with you, Ned. IF this ‘boots on the ground’ training exercise were done correctly, our troops would be there merely as ‘training officers’ for the Ukrainian army. Just exactly as they were when we sent the fighter jets over. We had pilots go with them to teach the Ukrainian pilots how to fly, and properly use, them.
I can see you weren’t around in the late sixties when we only had ‘advisors’ in Vietnam. It never stops there. As soon as American soldiers are put in harm’s way, the die is cast.
James, I wasn’t fortunate enough to go interview the military. They 4-F’d me when I went to sign in due to spine surgery I had when I was in jr. high school. All I was able to do to serve my country was 26+ years of law enforcement and firefighting.
No, And never was in Vietnam. But I lost good friends over there that never made it back home.
Fortunate enough? A curious phrase. I wonder if those of your friends who didn't return felt that way. I spent four years in the army on active duty between 1967 and 1971, and I can promise you I did not feel fortunate at all.
And how can you ignore history? There were lots of folks around then who thought, yes, just a few training officers for the South Vietnamese army. And our generation lost 50,000 dead in a war most of those who died in it never really understood, in which we made enough hor…
Sorry, we are already in World War III, as Europe was in 1936; it does not look like it, but it is. We dither for five years allowing Russia to hold Donbass when China attacks across the Taiwan strait and then we may be in a war we can not win that will likely go nuclear. Trainers started in Viêt Nam for ten years before Presidents Kennedy and Johnson went kinetic; true. But this is Ukraine, not Viêt Nam.
Those trainers would not be not in the middle of a civil war, at least from the view of eve…
If it does not look like WWIII, perhaps it is because it's not. You may well say that if the English and French had confronted Hitler in 1936, the actual war might have been prevented (although you conveniently fail to mention that other little business between China and Japan, when we helped to precipitate a larger engagement with our embargoes on oil and steel), but in doing so, you ignore the mindsets of men like Hitler (and likely Putin). Remember that Hitler took Germany into the flames rather than surrender, and that if his scientists had been able to give him nuclear warheads to go on his V-2's, it all would have been a very different story.
As I said, I'm fully supportive of giving the Ukrainians al the financial and supply help we can in order to help them stand Putin off, but when you suggest putting American soldiers into the Ukraine, I draw the line. War has a logic all its own. As any serious military leader will tell you, once the first shots are fired, all the fine pre-war plans go out the window. The first few Americans to be killed, and they would be in this day of far reaching artillery and missiles, would cause unbearable pressure on a US president to start real military action against Russia. From there, escalation would become inevitable, as it did in Vietnam when the VC started killing Americans in and around our airbases.