In a bizarre attempt to reinterpret history, US Senator John McCain said that the US not providing Ukraine with weapons for its armed conflict is "one of the most shameful chapters in American history."
McCain, a war veteran and overall-armed-conflict-supporter himself, was clearly aiming for biggest impact with his audience when he made the rather ridiculous statement on John Cats’ Roundtable Radio Show. It was somewhat expected of the man who called for the Iraq invasion in 2003, something more than half of the American public views as a huge mistake today.
In the last 100 years alone, the US has waged over two dozen wars. In fact, since America was founded in 1776, it has spent 214 out of 235 years at war. That’s over 90 percent of the time. The country has never gone a decade without war, and Senator McCain apparently wants that honorable trait to continue.
McCain said attacks on Ukraine are “one of the most shameful and dishonorable acts I have seen in my life,”Vietnam? Iraq?Afghanistan?Drones?
— Lutz (@lutzinvancouver) June 12, 2015
McCain has always been very liberal with the naming and shaming. He previously called the decision for the US to not intervene in Syria's conflict on the side of the rebels a "shameful chapter" in US history. Although McCain previously acknowledged the Armed Forces’ mass use of the toxic and deadly Agent Orange in Vietnam is an "issue between the two countries," he is not known to have called it a shameful chapter. And in 2007, McCain said that US President Harry Truman "made the right decision" by dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a decision that cost hundreds of thousands of innocent people their lives.
This time around, the Senator claimed that the conflict in Ukraine is nothing but "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin's aggression."
"The Ukrainians aren’t asking for American boots on the ground, they’re just asking for weapons to defend themselves and they’re being slaughtered by Vladimir Putin and his stooges and it’s disgraceful," McCain claimed.
McCain noted that not providing weapons to Ukraine is one of the biggest areas of concern when it comes to "moral commitment." He then strangely went on to add that "the real area of concern" for US is the Middle East, where foreign fighters are joining radical groups in Syria and Iraq and later returning to European countries from where they can reach the US. Trained, most likely, by those same moderate rebels – but that part doesn’t seem to hold much interest for the Senator.
The armed conflict in Ukraine began in April 2014, when the Ukrainian government ordered its military to attack buildings held by federalization supporters in the country's southeast. After failing to retake the buildings with regular troops, who often refused to fire on protesters and at times surrendered their equipment, Ukraine turned to using helicopter gunships, high-power artillery and cluster bombs against both occupied buildings and civilian areas.
