Obama Betrays an American Ally
Gingrich Productions To receive Newt’s weekly newsletters, click here. Imagine yourself for a moment in the shoes of an officer in the Ukrainian military. You might have served alongside American troops in Iraq–a war in which your country had no direct interest but in which 51 of your fellow Ukrainians were killed or wounded. Or you might have served as part of the NATO forces in Afghanistan. Now your country has been invaded by a foreign power, and tens of thousands of Russians are amassing on the border, apparently ready to invade. You are hearing rumors that the Russian snipers are being instructed to assassinate officers like yourself from a distance, but you have no body armor. You are being asked to help defend from the Russians a front stretching 1,000 miles long. You have no night vision equipment to police the border at night. You have no secure communications radios to coordinate with the rest of the Ukrainian forces. The Americans, whom your country fought alongside in Iraq and Afghanistan, will do nothing for you. The U.S. has plenty of these things–body armor, night vision, communications equipment, fuel for the Air Force–but they will not offer any of it for your defense. A bureaucratic rule bars the Pentagon from providing even these simple “Force Multipliers,” as a foreign army prepares to invade. And there is apparently little chance the U.S. will provide you with real weapons–equipment that might actually deter the Russians from invading in the first place. This is the picture painted in a sobering report from former NATO Commander Gen. (ret.) Wesley Clark and his colleague Dr. Phillip Karber, a former Defense Department official. They travelled to Ukraine recently at the invitation of senior government officials there, and returned with their assessment. It is absolutely worth reading in full.
It is an absurdity that the United States will not provide our allies with body armor to defend themselves from foreign aggression. If I was that Ukrainian officer, I would be furious. Perhaps the President needs this reminder, from the 1984 elections, of what real leadership looks like. To receive Newt’s weekly newsletters, click here. |