Harper follows Bush

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
May 19, 2006
So Stephen Harper has his war, and no matter what the rest of Canada orParliament thinks, he's determined to keep it. Doesn't that just make your chest swell?
Seventeen Canadians dead in Afghanistan so far and counting. And thanks to Commander-in-Chief Harper, this total will undoubtedly climb higher. Twenty? Thirty? One hundred? A thousand? Who knows? As a famous journalist once said "in war the first casualty is truth." And there are few, if any Canadians, in a position to divine what the "truth" is in Afghanistan. But brave, young Canadians like Captain Nichola Goddard, who was killed in a fire-fight Wednesday, will continue to die on the arid steppes of that God-forsaken part of the world and for what? So that Harper can threaten the people of Canada with a snap election if we don't go along with his war fantasies? Or is it because he wants to further his crass political attempt to divide the Liberal Party and get the elusive majority he so obviously lusts for? Or, let's be kind, is it because he genuinely believes that foreign occupiers that don't know the country, can't speak its language and don't share its religion can somehow do what 1,000 years of history has failed to do and pacify a country of war lords, religious fanatics, drug lords, opium growers, nomads, narco-bandits and the like?
Not in your lifetime Stephen and neither in mine.
Soldiers are not nation-builders. Iraq is ample proof of that even though George Bush hasn't figured it out yet and neither obviously has Harper. Soldiers are fighters. Their job is to protect their country from other countries attacking it. It's a noble and dangerous job and we all support and respect our troops for doing this. Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but to the best of my knowledge no one has attacked Canada. The last time I looked out the window I didn't see any Taliban freedom-fighters in the street. No bombs going off, no missiles and no shrapnel. So why are we at war if no one, little alone Afghanis, are attacking us?
This, of course, is where politics rears its ugly head. In particular, American politics of the post 9/11 kind. We all remember Osama bin Laden who supposedly escaped to a cave somewhere in Afghanistan after master-minding the fall of the Twin Towers. On this flimsy pretext, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and company launched "Operation Enduring Freedom" determined to bring bin Laden to "justice," American style. But crafty bin Laden gave the American war machine the slip, leaving Uncle Sam all geared up for war but no one to shoot at . Now if there's anything that makes Uncle Sam antsy it's having nothing to shoot at so they cobbled together a so-called "coalition" (Operation Enduring Freedom) to continue the war in Afghanistan while the might of America was turned against Iraq and its mythical arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Four years later and more than 2,500 American soldiers killed as well as thousands of Iraqi civilians the war that was supposed to bring democracy toIraq is bogged down in a hopeless quagmire, Iraq is in worse shape than it has ever been and George Bush's polling numbers are in the high 20's, making him the most unpopular president in more than 100 years.
And this is the debacle that Harper has signed up Canada to be part of for the next three years, covering Yankee butt in Afghanistan while Bush tries to figure out a face-saving stratagem to get out of Iraq. Harper has even started talking like Bush in terms of our sacred "mission" and that we can't"cut and run" now that the soldiers are there. But the fact of the matter is politicians put our soldiers in Afghanistan and they can take them out. The vote in Parliament to keep them there Wednesday was razor thin with the parliamentarians wanting to end the Afghanistan operation only falling four votes short. And the arrogance Harper showed, both leading up to the vote and afterwards, was nothing short of breathtaking. With 10 months to go in the current deployment, there was no rush to have the vote now. But Harper did for what Liberal foreign affairs critic Stephane Dion correctly called "crass political reasons."In the debate leading up to the motion, Harper, sensing how close the vote was going to be, announced that the mission would be extended for a year even if the vote went against him and that he would call an election on the issue within a year. He also had the audacity to say support for the mission is stronger in the country than it is in Parliament).
If Harper is serious about thinking he can win an election, little alone a majority, with Afghanistan as the issue I contend he doesn't know theCanadian people very well. Yes we love our soldiers, but we love them as peace-keepers, not as proxies for other people's wars.
-- 30 --