Horowitz: Biden pulls troops out of retirement for Ukraine as GOP continues to support the grift

The White House is making it clear that it’s not just our money on the line for Ukraine, but potentially the lives of our soldiers. And because we have such a recruitment problem, he has to draw upon semi-retired soldiers, placing them back into active duty for potential deployment to Europe. Meanwhile, Republicans refuse to cut off one penny of our aid or even support any limitation on our status as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s private Amazon, much less push back against Biden’s calling up of the reserves.

On Thursday, Biden quietly signed a brief and vague order calling up the “the reserve and selected members of the individual ready reserve” for “the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility.”

That sure sounds like a consolation to Zelenskyy for not immediately committing to adding his country to NATO. Right off the bat, Congress should be concerned with the endgame here. Why are we suddenly deploying more troops? This is especially ominous as the Pentagon announced the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine. We never voted for such an escalation.

What’s also disturbing is the fact that we clearly don’t have enough active-duty troops that we need to grab people out of semi-retirement. As Politico observed, “The move suggests that the U.S. military’s training mission in Europe, along with the deployment of several new brigades after the invasion, has stretched active-duty forces.” This comes at a time when the army is facing a 25% shortfall in enlistments last year.

What is even more shocking is that the overwhelming majority of members in both parties don’t seem concerned with the endgame or strategy of Biden’s extremely risky Ukraine policy, much less willing to put an end to it. We are already months into the much-vaunted “Ukrainian spring offensive,” funded by our money and weapons (and likely special forces), and they have nothing to show for it but a stalemate.

On the one hand, Russia really doesn’t have the power (or probably even desire) to march through the rest of Ukraine. On the other hand, Ukraine will never have the ability to permanently win back and hold the ethnically Russian-dominated areas that will always sit on Russia’s border. There is simply no reason to continue fueling this conflict from any worldview perspective. As indicated by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, if it wasn't so profitable for the defense industry in the U.S. and U.K., both sides would already be at the negotiating table and indeed had already started in 2022.

Over 500 days into well over $100 billion in U.S. funding of this proxy war – as we face a severe shortage of our own munitions – Congress had the perfect opportunity to finally force answers to hard questions in the NDAA. Yet even as Republicans adopted some Freedom Caucus amendments attacking the woke parts of the military, Ukrainian aid was unassailable. Only 70 Republicans, less than a third of the conference, supported the Gaetz amendment to cut off Ukrainian aid. It is notable that not a single Democrat supported it, despite the anti-war virtue-signaling of most of their members. So much for intellectual honesty.

Shockingly, we couldn’t even get Republicans to support more modest accountability measures on the Ukrainian heist. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) introduced an amendment requiring the Biden administration to send Congress an outline of the war strategy. The report was to include “a diplomatic pathway…by which the United States can facilitate a negotiated cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.” It also called upon the admin to send a cost report of the projected short-term and long-term expenditures and stipulated that no new funds can be dispensed unless the report is submitted to Congress. The amendment failed 129-301, with every Democrat opposing it, along with 90 Republicans.

“The Biden administration has been proclaiming that we will support Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ with no qualifiers and no plan to end the conflict,” observed Rep. Dan Bishop, a Freedom Caucus member from North Carolina. “A detailed report like the one Rep. Davidson is proposing should be the bare minimum.”

This is especially true given that Biden announced at the NATO summit in Vilnius that he plans to pursue an “Israel model” relationship with Ukraine as it relates to security aid. As we are all well aware, that relationship has lasted for decades. Are the American people willing to extend that to an unstable and corrupt place like Ukraine? And unlike Israel against the local Arab terrorists, we’d be fueling a fight against a nuclear power.

Even to simply block cluster bombs from being transferred to Ukraine was too much for every Democrat and most Republicans. Only 98 Republicans supported the amendment from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blocking the transfer. Only 89 Republicans supported another one of her amendments to strike merely $300 million from Ukrainian aid, a fraction of 1% of what we have sent Ukraine.

The “open pocketbook, closed mouth” mentality from congressional Republicans would be appalling enough if we were merely Zelenskyy’s private Amazon, as U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace recently lamented. But when you commit this much ordinance, including cluster bombs, against Russia, our blood is clearly also being placed on the line. Biden drew that line on Thursday. Hours later, the leadership of the GOP, including Speaker McCarthy and Minority Leader McConnell, have no answers. Just like with Pfizer, “it’s all good” when it comes to Ukraine.