Congress Republicans could block further military aid to Ukraine while keeping Israel stocked with arms, a former congressman has said.
US President Joe Biden has sought to exploit the major escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on October 7 to leverage an extra $60 billion-worth of weaponry for his proxy conflict with Russia in Ukraine.
His administration has packaged both into an omnibus emergency spending bill including $14 billion for Israel, which his aides are lobbying for on Capitol Hill.
But new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, voted in after radicals in his party opposed to more Ukraine spending ousted Kevin McCarthy, insists that the two requests must be voted on separately.
Former Democrat congressman Alan Grayson told Sputnik that the omnibus bill was a "parliamentary manoeuvre to slap two things together and force people who were inclined to vote for one against the other, to vote for both."
"You probably could get a majority vote for $14 billion straight up for Israel right now, Understandably so," Grayson said, but "The Ukraine situation is much more complicated."
He noted that opposition to the doomed Ukraine project was growing in the Republican ranks.
"So we're in a situation now where a substantial number of Republicans want to vote for Israel aid, but against Ukraine aid. And the new speaker, 'MAGA Mike', is actually catering to that."
The former Congress representative stressed the disparity in the amounts Biden was asking for the two leading US client states.
"You're talking about apples and oranges or cluster bombs and hand grenades or whatever. You're talking about two different things here" Grayson said. "In the case of Ukraine, the war's been going on for a long time. And at this point, it's skirmishes in various places and continuing live fire in a lot of places. So it's fundamentally different from what's happening now in Gaza and Israel."
He explained that meant Ukraine's immediate costs were far lower than those of Israel, which had launched an unprecedented mobilisation of army reservists for its declared war on Gaza.
"A rule of thumb is that it costs about half a million dollars a year to actually field the soldier and keep them fed and arm and so on. And Israel is doing that now with 340,000 soldiers," Grayson said. "So by some kind of reckoning that's costing half a billion dollars a day. There's no way that the war in Ukraine is costing half a billion dollars a day."
"It's understandable that the aid might have run out because the aid was limited to begin with to Ukraine," he continued.. "But the Israeli situation is extremely intense and expensive right now from a military-economic point of view."
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