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 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.
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.
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”.
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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Yes, the US is making money helping Ukraine uphold 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.
Oh look, the “NATO is anything I don’t like” Russian apologist tankie guy is back at pulling out fake shit out of their ass.
The US is the second largest manufacturer on the planet, and insources its military production.
Ukraine is complaining that we can’t send them Soviet era military structure compatible weaponry. The US had largely phased out “dig a trench and use artillery to make a breakthrough” back in the late 80s, because we could attain air superiority against Soviet tech.
I see you’re coming at me with another semantic argument. This one based on the notion that by ‘doesn’t have an industrial base’ I can only mean ‘doesn’t have any industrial base’. That’s a rather strange reading as it assumes I have zero grasp of logic. The existence of the tiniest fragment of industry would render my argument incorrect. It’s acting in bad faith to assume I meant that.
Which leaves the search for an alternative interpretation. Such as the US doesn’t have a sufficient industrial base to achieve its goals militarily in the Ukraine. The figures are hard to come by as there are lots of definitional issues. Still, trade publications and Congress are worried.
US manufacturing can be as large as it likes but if it can’t join up it’s thinking and produce what fighters on the front line need, it doesn’t count for much. It’s DIB is not set up for wars against industrialised countries that are determined to fight back. It doesn’t matter what weapons and compatible ammunition the US does produce, either, if it isn’t working to supply them to the people doing the fighting and isn’t willing to use them itself for (rightly) being at least a little bit reluctant to start a nuclear third world war.
I’m a little skeptical of the extent of the claims about the weaknesses of the DIB and more so of the framing of the solution. The details are coming from people who want to increase the military budget (without otherwise wanting to change the underlying political economic system). Still, there does seem to be some movement to use the Ukraine war to justify costly improvements to the US DIB.
Will the changes come? And will they come in time to defeat Russia in Ukraine within a reasonable time frame? The plan will struggle against the existing contradictions unless there’s a change in logic, which doesn’t seem to be on the cards. So it’s unlikely to be a complete success even if some fixes are implemented.
It’s irrelevant whether you accept what I’m saying. I’m only summarising what the US military is saying. This is public information. If you’re interested, search for ‘us defense industrial base’. What I’ve explained is such a hot topic, you don’t even need to add e.g. ‘problems’ to the search terms for articles about the problems to be returned.
Your position literally is the NATO is all the imperial capitalists in the world, and somehow Russia is not involved in either of those definitions and deserves to be apologized for. It’s internally inconsistent and is shill behavior.
You have an agenda, and it’s pro imperialist, as long as the imperialist is not the US. Congrats; If you were in the US, you’re dumb enough that you’d be shilling for Trump because “He’s gonna drain the swamp!”
You’re only summarizing what the US Military Industrial Complex is saying, which isn’t the US Military. National Defense Industrial Association != US Military, again going back to the “NATO is whatever I define it as” that you keep insisting.
Mark Milley is the mouthpiece of the US Military as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he’s not mincing words: Russia will lose militarily in Ukraine. It will take time and blood, but the US is responsible for 34% of the world’s military industrial output and claiming
Is not reality. We’ve only faced off once, and the Battle of Khasham did not go well for the “industrialized country determined to fight back”
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
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.
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:
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.
The nutbag’s definition of NATO includes Russia.