U.S. complains Ukraine is too worried about casualties. Easy for the U.S. to say.
Would there be a U.S. peace movement if U.S. soldiers were dying?
A year and a half into the war and with more than 500,000 dead or wounded The New York Times reported earlier in August that US officials “fear” Ukraine has become “casualty averse”.
That seems easy to say when no American soldiers are at risk.
I wonder if there would be a peace movement here if American women and men were dying in Ukraine?
As some, even on the Left, argue that there should be no talk of peace or even negotiations until Russia is defeated and Putin overthrown. To these domestic warriors, and to most Americans, the war is invisible except as few minutes on the nightly news.
It reminds me of the days back during the Vietnam war when Republican and Democratic politicians who never spent a moment in combat argued for sending more troops.
Many used their positions to keep their kids from being drafted.
“Chicken hawks,” we called them.
Then there are the current batch of liberal war hawks in Washington who want the US to keep funding the proxy war.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney recently called the conflict “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done.”
“We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia,” Romney said. “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money … a weakened Russia is a good thing.”
And then there is Democratic Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal. In an op-ed piece for the Connecticut Post, Blumenthal wrote:
Even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide, should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half. We’ve united NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan. We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military.
All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.
This is the very definition of a proxy war.
We can fight and weaken Russia and do it on the cheap.
After all, it’s only costing Ukrainian lives.