On Thursday, Joe Biden made the stunning announcement that the United States would send tanks and other offensive equipment to Ukraine. The move is a stunning reversal after nearly a year of refusing to do so.
In fact, Biden specifically stated that providing Ukraine with tanks would escalate the Ukraine-Russia war to World War III.
“The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews — just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what y’all say, that’s called World War III,” Biden told a gathering of House Democrats in Philadelphia said on March 11, 2022.
So how did we go from “it would start World War III” to sending 31 M1A1 Abrams tanks, eight M88 recovery vehicles, and more than 500 armored vehicles nearly a year later?
According to Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is the one who recommended the move. But just last week, both Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley were adamantly against sending tanks to Ukraine. One reason is that it would take months to train the Ukraine military to use the tanks. Other officials told NBC News that Ukraine already has hundreds of tanks at its disposal, including captured Russian tanks.
So why did things suddenly change? Between Biden’s assessment that sending tanks to Ukraine would start WWIII and Austin and Milley both opposing sending tanks to Ukraine last week, the sudden change in policy raises red flags.
The most important to ask is: Why now?
It seems like more than a coincidence that this policy reversal comes as Biden is currently facing a neverending scandal involving the mishandling of classified documents. This week alone, there were several serious new developments in the scandal, making the situation even worse than previously thought.
For starters, it was revealed that Biden’s team did not self-report the discovery of the classified documents to the Department of Justice — Biden’s private lawyer, Patrick Moore, reported them first to the White House. After this, the White House didn’t report it to the Department of Justice but to the National Archives. Biden’s team treated the discovery as a political problem and cared more about keeping the discovery under the radar than about doing the right thing. It took the National Archives inspector general, Dr. Brett M. Baker, to report it to law enforcement. Despite patting itself on the back for being forthcoming and transparent, all evidence suggests that the White House was hoping this story would never see the light of day.
And then it gets worse. Despite repeated claims by Biden and the White House that they have been fully cooperating from the beginning, this was revealed to be not true. Biden wasn’t originally willing to consent to have the Justice Department search his home and only agreed to it after Justice Department indicated it would seek a warrant if necessary.
These two bombshells alone undermine two key talking points of the Biden administration that Biden is just an innocent man who has been trying to do the right thing after the classified documents were discovered.
And yet the scandal got worse still after emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop suggest that Hunter Biden may have been accessing the classified documents while he was staying at the Wilmington, Del., home in the wake of his divorce and had used the information they contained while conducting his shady business dealings in Ukraine.
So we have these serious developments this week, and then the Biden administration reverses a nearly year-long policy opposing supplying Ukraine with tanks — a move Biden previously said would cause World War III? It’s hardly a stretch to assume that Joe Biden is deliberately escalating the situation in Ukraine to distract from this scandal that threatens the future of his presidency.
Since the 1997 film Wag the Dog, the idiom has come to mean the “superfluous (military) action in order to distract from domestic scandal.” Is that what Biden’s doing now? Is he escalating the Ukraine/Russia war to distract from his classified documents scandal, which seems to be getting worse every day?
