Those of us who really know the score, aren’t happy about our role in Afghanistan. And your saying things like this doesn’t help:
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton thanked Canadians for staying the course in Afghanistan, knowing the price of that commitment is the blood of its soldiers.
"It’s painful that you’re losing people there and I’m sorry," Mr. Clinton said Thursday in a speech to 7,000 people at Rexall Place.
"But you’ve done a good thing for the cause of freedom and the stability of Canada.
"And as a citizen I am profoundly grateful that you’ve stayed the course and I appreciate it," he said to applause.
[…]
He noted that should troops pull out, the government of President Hamid Karzai, a moderate Muslim, would have to reach out to local drug warlords to keep control.
"If we were to abandon him, he would be forced to make even more deals with those people, which would bring more drugs to Canada, the United States and Europe," he said.
Political chaos, he said, would also re-open the door to Taliban forces to retake control of parts of the country and give terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda a staging ground for attacks abroad.
With all due respect, Big Dawg…this isn’t about the cause of freedom, or the stability of Canada. We would be more free, and probably a helluva lot more stable, if we’d stayed the hell out of there. As it is, we’ve just slapped a big KICK ME sign on our own backs for al-Q to heed…
Don’t get us wrong, Bill; we like you. (We like you even more when we compare you to your two immediate predecessors and your successor.) But we Canadians are not, by and large, a people that equate wartime bloodshed with the cause of freedom. We know for a fact that war makes us less free; our own history confirms it, as does yours. And we also know that freedom is just another word, unless you take it in hand and live it, rather than die “defending” something else which you’ve mistaken for it.
Besides, Hamid Karzai’s control doesn’t extend beyond Kabul, and never did (nor will it). He’s Unocal’s man in the ‘stan. He’s not going to pull the country together behind him no matter what drug lords and warlords he gets onside. (And besides, Canada’s biggest drug problem is NOT Afghan heroin, which is actually the least of our woes; it’s imported European synthetic drugs and homegrown pot. Not so much the dope per se, but the fact that it’s illegal, leading producers to run serious fire risks in the name of keeping their grow-ops and polydrug labs clandestine.)
No, Bill…this is about one thing only: the tyranny (and “stability”) of the very US-dominated “coalition” that is NATO, which by all rights should have been dismantled when the Berlin Wall fell (and the Warsaw Pact dissolved), as that is when its original mandate ended.
Funny, too, how you never did anything about the Taliban yourself while in office. Didn’t they seize power on your watch? Maybe you’re ashamed of the fact that your country is actually behind the creation of them, out of those cuddly mujahideen the US enlisted to drive the Soviets out–and the CIA, under your predecessors Reagan and Bush, trained Osama bin Laden? You’re a smart man, Bill. Surely you can’t be unaware of all this. But you could very well be embarrassed, and unsure what to do, and anxious to distance yourself from it. No wonder you’ve swept it neatly under the rug with fine talk of “freedom” and “stability”.
No, Bill, don’t thank us. Please. If you want to show real respect to us Canucks, just own up to your country’s role in creating this mess it’s in–and which it’s pulled us into, over the objections of a clear majority of the Canadian people.
And please, PLEASE, Bill–don’t ask us to get any further embroiled. We can’t afford that kind of “freedom”. The sooner we can get out, the better it will be for all of us.
We don’t want to stay on al-Q’s hit list, and neither should you.
