The US has come up a clever way of masking their contempt of the Ukrainian military in their failed counteroffensive against Russia.
Dismayed that Ukraine is squandering US weapons by hurling them at Russian forces instead hurling themselves at the well-fortified invaders, armchair US military are calling the Ukrainians “casualty adverse,” a nice way of calling them, cowards. US/UK war games ahead of the June counteroffensive envisioned Ukraine taking large casualties in order to reclaim Donbas so they could start brutalizing Donbas Ukrainians again.
That was OK for the US war party. Hey, didn’t that work for England and France during trench warfare during WWI? Apparently, US strategists forgot those allies lost a few million soldiers to take at best a few hundred yards. The Ukraine general staff shot back: “We simply don’t have the resources to do the frontal attacks that the West is imploring us to do.”
The US knew Ukraine had neither the human nor explosive resources to regain territory, a US precondition for ending the war through negotiations. That makes the US proxy war against Russia, shedding only Ukrainian blood and only destroying the Ukrainian economy, a grotesque US moral crime that must be resisted by every peace loving American.
President Biden has painted the US into a corner of death and despair he spent the last half century leading up to promoting American empire and exceptionalism. It may be too late for the electorate to inspire an epiphany in Biden to pivot to peace.
But we must try.
Walt Zlotow became involved in antiwar activities upon entering University of Chicago in 1963. He is current president of the West Suburban Peace Coalition based in the Chicago western suburbs. He blogs daily on antiwar and other issues at www.heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com.
How dare the Ukrainians not sacrifice themselves happily for the Great Empire Of Lies! To die in service to America’s Neocons and the American Corportocracy is the noblest deed imaginable.
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
~ Judge Holden ~
Blood Meridian
I would think most countries are “casualty adverse.”
The US is “casualty adverse” when it comes to Americans murdering other Americans.
In other words, “human wave tactics,” exactly the thing they falsely accused Russia of.
(In well-prepared interviews with Ukie soldiers in Bakhmut they always claimed that while they were losing ground, they had personally machine gunned countless Russians running at them. Curiously they could never show film of this or of the masses of bodies lying around, even though the Ukrainians loved showing pictures of dead bodies.)
Okay so NY times and Co report that Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Nears 500,000 according to U.S. Officials. And then you have some others talk about more than 300,000 dead Ukrainians.
You would think that numbers too high however it seems very difficult to get anything resembling facts.