The Pentagon wants more US military advisers in Ukraine
“The Vietnam War began with a few hundred soldiers”
Washington reportedly wants to station more military personnel in Ukraine to monitor American arms shipments. A prominent US legal expert warns that the Vietnam War, which ended in trauma for the US, began in a similar way.
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A mural in Buenos Aires with two iconic images of the war: on the left a war victim in Ukraine, on the right the “napalm girl” photographed in Vietnam in 1972.
Daniel KestenholzEditor’s Night Service
Apparently the Pentagon wants to send more military advisers to Ukraine. US President Joe Biden (80) is seeking to step up efforts to monitor the delivery and use of US weapons. This requires more US military personnel in the field, like NBC News reported this week.
In early November, Washington confirmed for the first time that US troops are already deployed in Ukraine on weapons inspections. The number of uniformed US soldiers in the warring nation should now be increased. A prominent US lawyer sees parallels in this with Vietnam, where the war lasted from 1955 to 1975.
Sending more US military advisers to Ukraine is reminiscent of the start of the Vietnam War in 1959, according to former US judge Andrew Napolitano (72), who made his name in America as a television legal expert. “So the Vietnam War began, with a few hundred soldiers who went there as advisers,” says Napolitano on his YouTube channel. “This is extremely dangerous. This could be a mission to get troops on the ground. What if some of them come back in body bags.”
The decision belongs to Biden, not to the people
Officially, the field specialists’ mission is limited to scanning barcodes on weapons; to ensure that the weapons were also those delivered through Poland, according to Napolitano. “It’s absurd that they only show up there with barcode devices like the ones we all use in supermarkets. Is that why they’re risking their lives?”
President Biden can decide such missions himself, Napolitano explains. This requires “no approval from the United States Congress and no consent of the American people”.
The lawyer, also known as “Judge Napolitano”, “Richter Napolitano”, runs his YouTube channel “Judging Freedom”, which means “freedom of judgement”. Until 2017, Napolitano (72) was an analyst at the US broadcaster Fox News. On YouTube, Napolitano still comments on the news almost every day – these days in advance of the war in Ukraine.
The trauma of American war
The Vietnam War, in which 58,220 US soldiers were killed, sparked a powerful antiwar movement in the United States. Most of the US population seems rather apathetic towards Ukraine. Public pressure is also mounting to solve problems at home rather than in distant Ukraine. Calls for less money and less theater-of-war weapons are growing louder in the United States.
