By Bing West
Sunday, May 29
2022
With shock and dismay, I read this statement that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs, made
on May 23:
Many
countries in the world depend on Ukrainian grain. As for what we’re doing about
it, we don’t have any naval assets on the Black Sea. We don’t intend to. . . .
It’s a no-go for commercial shipping.
Note the use of the pronoun “we.” Milley
is the top military adviser to the president. So it is reasonable to assume
that the “we” refers to both General Milley and President Biden.
There is a moral component to Milley’s
words. Both the president and the chairman profess to be devout in their
religion. Tens of thousands of the world’s poor will starve to death because,
as Milley put it, “we don’t intend to place naval assets in the Black Sea.” Thus were
morality and compassion dismissed.
More important, the president and the
chairman are charged with defending our beloved nation. Putting morality aside,
we expect courage from those whose job is to protect us. By fleeing from the
Black Sea when Putin sailed in, they jointly abandoned the bedrock principle of
freedom of the seas. No commercial shipping, General Milley declared, not with
Putin glowering. And so they have established the precedent for Xi to push us
out of the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits.
Both morality (feeding the poor) and
courage (standing up for the principles of our nation) have been abandoned in
the Black Sea. President Biden and General Milley’s peremptory decision to give
up is discouraging. The least they could have done was organize a humanitarian
convoy, including the United States and many other nations, to escort out the
grain ships.
Why haven’t they done it? Do they believe
that Putin would go to war against dozens of countries in order to starve the
poor? Sadly, our president and the chairman of the joint chiefs took counsel of
their fears. It is past time to put aside fear and do the right thing.
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