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.
Without the US more ukrainians would die and Russia would have overrun them by now. So it’s a win win.
And 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.
Except for the nearly a million Euromaidan protesters and half the country in support of protest, with the support rising after the supposed “coup”? The very protest that set the “coup” in motion because Russia used the corrupt pro-russia prime minister to strike down the pro-eu deal. Seems to me like Ukrainians wanted this “coup”.
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.
Well in that case you should support US sending weapons even more, just fascists fighting fascists, right?
At this point I support the US sending the F-16s tomorrow, yesterday, whenever they want really, it’s not like anything short of nukes or direct NATO involvement has any chance of flipping the current situation around.
Let’s see those toy planes shot down by Russia’s anti-air and extremely dug-in defenses, I’m sure it’ll do very well for morale in the Ukrainian army and support back at home in the US!
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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.
Yes, the US is making money upholding international law and russia is losing money committing war crimes to the last Ukrainian.
If Russia’s aims are ‘imperialistsic’, is it losing money?
Yes, you spend blood and treasure to conquer land and then brag about it in history books.
You impose your rule on that land and your peasants rejoice at your statesmanship and feel blessed to join such a great nation, or else…
My point is that nobody doing that would be doing it for free. This applies the apologia for all other empires to Russia. I.e. that empire builders do it sometimes by accident but always for benevolent reasons. That’s incorrect. Empires are built by extracting wealth and to extract wealth.
I think you agree with this as I’m reading your second paragraph as sarcasm. If you do agree, then it’s not possible to conclude that Russia will lose money. It may do, if it loses, although even that is questionable. If it wins, it will gain wealth. Or it’s capitalists will do so. There’s a contradiction between your two paragraphs.
If Russia’s motivations are imperialistic (I haven’t seen evidence for that, myself, but it depends on one’s definition of imperialism), there would be no point if it cost more money to achieve than would be recouped after. Until it’s over, it’s not possible to say that it’s already lost money. It’s costly, but that’s different, and doesn’t answer, ‘Costly for whom?’
(Please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying that Russia will not exploit whatever parts of Ukraine it keeps hold of. It’s capitalist. Of course it will. I’m suggesting that this war doesn’t amount to a land grab simpliciter.)
One counter to this is that the US is spending money to ensure that Russia does lose money. Time will tell whether I’m right or wrong but I think this drastically overestimates the strength of the US. It doesn’t have an industrial base (except in vassal and puppet states). So it cannot match Russia’s military output.
And the industries the US does possess are governed by the logic of finance capital not industrial capital. Money spent does not indicate how much has been bought. $10bn spent on weapons, for instance, doesn’t mean you get $10bn worth of weapons by the time you factor in all the sales teams, admin, embezzlement, and middle managers, etc.
The US seems incapable of providing Ukraine with the arms that the Ukrainian military is asking for. It’s publications have started to admit this more and more. Due to the above-mentioned logics, the US doesn’t have the intellectual-ideological or industrial capacity to ramp up manufacturing. The US certainly has people bright enough to figure it out but they’re inconsequential in the face of a military-industrial complex designed to make as much money as possible rather than to ‘win’ wars.
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.
Russia has been using cluster munitions the entire war, and their bomblets have a 40% failure rate. US-made ones have a >3% failure rate. Point your criticism where it belongs