US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Friday that she and other House Republican lawmakers are preparing to move forward with an audit of US aid to Ukraine, an idea first proposed late last year before the House Republican majority took effect.
"We don’t even have committees filled yet but [Congressman Michael McCaul] and I are already preparing to move forward with the audit of Ukraine. No more blank checks to Ukraine," Greene said via Twitter.
House Republicans are committed to transparency for US taxpayers, Greene added.
In November, Greene and several other House Republicans introduced a resolution to initiate an audit of funds appropriated by Congress to Ukraine. The measure failed during the "lame duck" session of the 117th Congress, but Greene vowed to reintroduce the idea in the new 118th Congress. House Republicans now hold a majority in the lower chamber, with Speaker Kevin McCarthy having started the party’s mantra of ending "blank checks" from the US to Ukraine. McCarthy also backed the initial Ukraine aid audit proposal.
On Thursday, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said that the Defense Department is responsive to oversight by Congress, adding that he looks forward to further bipartisan support for Ukraine.
However, defense budget cuts proposed by the new House Republican majority could force hard questions about funding for foreign operations related to Ukraine and NATO, former Pentagon analyst and retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
Greene has also called for Ukraine to begin negotiations toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict, characterizing it as a "proxy war" between the United States and Russia.
'Their Blood, Our Bullets': How US Training of Ukrainians Exposes Washington's Grim Global Strategy
The United States has allocated over $125 million to train more than 26,000 Ukrainian troops since the 2014 coup in Kiev, with Washington's allies providing instruction to tens of thousands more. What challenges does this assistance pose? What are its risks and benefits? And why are some US officials speaking out in opposition? Sputnik explores.
Ukrainian servicemen being flown into the US to learn how to operate the Patriot air defense battery promised by President Biden last month are expected to begin training as soon as next week, the Pentagon has announced.
According to Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder, about 90-100 Ukrainian troops are set to arrive at Fort Sill, Oklahoma for "several months" of intensive training, including classroom study, hands-on drills, and exercises in a simulation lab.
"The training will be tailored to provide relevant tactics, techniques and procedures based on the battlefield conditions in Ukraine to enable them to employ that to maximum effect once they are back in Ukraine," Ryder told reporters on Tuesday.
Russian officials have warned extensively of the consequences of the Patriot deployment, citing its propensity to escalate the conflict and serve as further proof that the Ukrainian security crisis is really just a proxy conflict between Russia and NATO. President Putin warned in December that Russia would inevitably find an "antidote" to the bulky mobile air defense system, signaling that the two batteries of 12 Patriot launchers promised to Kiev by the US and Germany will inevitably be targeted for destruction by Russian missiles after deploying on Ukrainian soil.
President Biden, meanwhile, jumped the gun in celebrating the Patriots' delivery, suggesting last week that they are already "helping a lot," despite not being sent yet.
America First Opposition
Not everyone in the US is happy about the Ukrainian Patriot crew training on Oklahoma's soil. This week, Oklahoma politician Nathan Dahm, the self-described "most conservative state senator" in the state's Senate, sparked a Twitter feud with neocons and neoliberals alike after demanding that Ukrainian troops be kept out, and filing legislation in the state’s Senate to keep them out.
"The Pentagon is planning on sending Ukrainian troops to Oklahoma to train on US missile systems. The last thing we need is them misfiring a missile into Oklahoma, killing our citizens like they did to the innocent Polish lives that were lost," Dahm tweeted, referencing the incident involving a Ukrainian S-300 missile which crashed in Poland in November, killing two Polish citizens – and threatening to ignite World War III as Kiev blamed Russia for the misfire.
I just filed SCR2 to reject foreign soldiers on Oklahoma soil. The pentagon is planning on sending Ukrainian troops to Oklahoma to train on U.S. missile systems. The last thing we need is them misfiring a missile into Oklahoma… pic.twitter.com/iuzSHOqznV
— Nathan Dahm (@NathanDahm) January 11, 2023
Dahm spent the following days explaining that the conflict in Ukraine was not Oklahoma's, or America's, to fight, and that "no foreign troops" from a country in active combat should be stationed in the state. "Ukrainian politicians are not Americans, even though the money laundering certainly benefits both them and our own sell-out politicians. What part of Ukraine do you think is America? Find a map that shows America and Ukraine. See a difference?" Dahm wrote in one of several response tweets after being flooded with derisive comments, many of whom he maligned as "foreigners and Twitter bots."
Dahm’s criticism of the Ukrainian training deployment in his state echoes concerns expressed by a small but growing group of Republican lawmakers in Washington about US involvement in a proxy conflict with Russia – with over 50 House lawmakers and 11 senators voting against US aid to Kiev in the last Congress, and the mostly pro-Trump ‘America First’ crowd of politicians vowing to tighten, if not halt, assistance after November’s midterms.
Training for Tyranny
Until the rise of the 'America First' Republicans, anti-interventionism had long been the preserve of libertarians and the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party, who spent decades warning about the consequences of US interventions abroad, including the training of foreign troops, and sought to restrain the executive wing’s decision-making power on the matter.
US training of foreign militaries dates back to the Cold War and what President John F. Kennedy once characterized as the "twilight struggle"between the USA and the USSR for control of the planet. The Pentagon, the CIA and other agencies provided several kinds of training assistance, from aid to allied conventional armies in Europe and Asia against the Soviets and China, to counterinsurgency support to juntas in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Congo, Somalia, and much of Latin America, to pro-insurgency aid in places like Nicaragua, Cuba, and Angola.
In the 1990s, a number of embarrassing details leaked out about the training being provided to Washington’s foreign partners during the Cold War, revealing that, contrary to assurances that training aid was being sent to shore up democracy and freedom against the godless communists, the US military was giving foreign troops the tools to engage in war crimes.
In 1996, for example, the Pentagon released a stack of seven previously classified manuals used in the 1980s for intelligence training at the School of the Americas (SOA) –the infamous DoD educational institution at Fort Benning, Georgia which provided foreigners the knowhow to fight in the CIA’s "dirty wars." The manuals taught pupils how to summarily execute anti-government fighters, assassinate dissidents, infiltrate social movements, engage in illegal surveillance, torture and physical abuse, how to use drugs to extract information from detainees, and how to engage in blackmail (including through bounties for the release of the bodies of dead enemy combatants).
Over 60,000 servicemen from Latin American countries passed through the SOA during the Cold War, and in the late 1990s, growing public pressure inside the US institution contributed to the school’s rebranding as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union did not reduce US training of foreign militaries. On the contrary, in the interests of propping up the ‘new world order’ announced by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, Washington expanded it. According to one estimate, the US spent nearly $15 billion to train some 2.3 million foreign military personnel between 1999 and 2016 alone, with some 71,000 pupils from 157 countries trained in 2019.
In a curiously forthright article published on the site of the Modern War Institute, a research center at West Point – one of America’s most prestigious military schools, in 2022, contributor Renanah Miles Joyce admitted that although US training was supposed to include the transmission of "professional norms, or ideas about appropriate behavior," including "respect for human rights and civilian control of the military," the reality was that these attitudes were being taught effectively.
"In the last decade, US-trained soldiers have launched coups in Mali, Egypt, and Guinea (while in the middle of training with US Army Special Forces); raped children in the Congo; and otherwise abused human rights or defied civilian norms. In response, observers have questioned whether US efforts to impart norms work," Joyce wrote.
The author blamed the abuses on “blind spots” in the US effort to “impart liberal norms” onto foreign students, apparently not considering the possibility that using the kind of soft power involved in training to impart a particular ideology might almost inevitably give rise to such abuses.
From the 2000s on, the US justified its foreign troop training expenditures through the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which led to the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the dirty war against Syria, the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, and ongoing US counterinsurgency operations across much of Africa.
According to a 2021 study by Boston University’s Costs of War project, the US provided "counterterrorism training" to, engaged in military exercises in, launched drone strikes on, or engaged in combat in a total of 85 countries, including most of Africa, virtually the entire Middle East apart from Iran, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
©Photo : Costs of War Project
In recent years, training operations have complemented little-reported on US combat operations in places like Iraq and Syria, Yemen, Niger, Somalia, Kenya and the Philippines, and large-scale troop deployments in Europe and Asia, including directly on Russia’s borders in the Baltics and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Washington's Grim Endgame
With the Biden administration on track to continuing to ramp up US military assistance to Ukraine, including training support, it will be up to detractors ‘in the belly of the beast’ in Washington to challenge such support via protests, activism and legislation.
However, so long as the current strategy surrounding ‘aid’ prevails, achieving that goal may be extremely difficult to accomplish. As both neoconservative and neoliberal commentators have openly declared, training Ukraine to fight Russia is a real “bargain” for Washington, since it’s Ukrainians and Russians, not Americans, who have to do the fighting, and the dying.
"It's money well spent and in my humble opinion this is very much like what Ronald Reagan did back in the 80s, and I do have some experience with that," North said in an interview back in November. “[Reagan] believed in supporting freedom fighters. He did it in Latin America, he did it in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique. He did it in Afghanistan. Those people were willing, as the Ukrainian people are, to use their blood and our bullets,” the pundit stressed.
Timothy Ash over at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a neoliberal Washington think tank, echoed North’s sentiments in a recent article entitled "It's Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia." The researcher pointed out that the resources being used to support Ukraine’s war effort are substantially less than the US’s overall military budget, and that propping up the regime in Kiev is “a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia's conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives."
Ash gushed about the series of positive policy outcomes for the United States being ensured by the Ukrainian crisis, from raising NATO defense spending, to forcing Europeans to buy American natural gas. "Europe is desperately trying to source alternative energy supplies, and US liquefied natural gas (LNG) is proving to be the obvious beneficiary," he wrote. Ultimately, the CEPA contributor emphasized that "on so many levels, continued US support for Ukraine is a no-brainer from a bang for buck perspective," and that "miring" Russia in "a war it cannot win is a huge strategic win for the US."
Until the majority view in Washington changes, or some 'catastrophic and catalyzing event' forces it to change, new 'Ukraine-style' conflicts seem certain to continue.
