The perception that a Conservative government has transformed Canada into a "warrior nation" is wrong. Canada was always a warrior nation:
When I went to Ottawa in 1998 to become the director and CEO of the (old) Canadian War Museum, I found the third floor of the cramped museum devoted to peacekeeping. Why? I asked. Because my predecessor had polled visitors and been told they wanted to see more on peacekeeping. The problem was that the CWM’s exhibits almost completely omitted NATO and NORAD, a total bowdlerization of postwar history. So I reduced the peacekeeping exhibits substantially and put in big exhibits on Canada’s two main alliances. To Richler, this was the triumph of the warrior nation idea over the peacekeeping ideal. Maybe, but to me, it was simply getting the history right, the task of a museum just as much as it is (or should be) of historians.
Pat Kennelly, Associate Director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, writes an astounding load of fiction posing as non-fiction on CommonDreams.org on June 6, claiming that NATO and US Forces in Afghanistan are the cause of all of the problems of Afghan women. For instance, Kennelly claims:
NATO operations have caused greater insecurity for women. They create countless widows, destroy homes, and foster a psychological terror that women are not safe and secure, even in their own homes.
He offers no evidence whatsoever to back this claim, and goes on to imply that the "occupation" is responsible for everything from self-immolation cases among women to maternal mortality.
It's also remarkable that in an article on the theme of what most plagues Afghan women, the word "Taliban" is not mentioned even once. Yet it's indisputably the Taliban who pose the greatest threat to the rights of women and the evidence I would offer is their well-established track record from 1994-2001 as the greatest misgynists the world has ever known.
Kennelly vaguely alludes to evidence from interviews in Afghanistan that would support his claims:
In recent visits to schools, orphanages, and Afghan NGOs, ordinary Afghans did not identify specific
When an American soldier killed 16 civilians in Kandahar in March, condemnation was swift and it came from all sides of the war.
The US Government was quick to apologize, with US President Barack Obama stating, "The United States takes this as seriously as if it was our own citizens and our own children who were murdered." NATO immediately announced it was investigating the incident.
President Karzai, whose regime is financed in great part by US resources, slammed the US, saying to reporters a few days after the incident: "This has been going on for too long. You have heard me before. It is by all means the end of the rope here." Karzai, surrounded by media, paid visits to the victims' families and wore black for two days. He publicly participated in conspiracy theorizing that the soldier didn't really act alone, and the killings may have been planned and intentional, conspiracies that have otherwise been propagated by the likes of the Russian Government-owned RT.com and RAWA.org, and which helped add fuel to the flames in an already highly volatile situation.
The Taliban, for their part, immediately used the occasion to spurn out anti-American propaganda. They called US forces...More >>
Indiscriminate insurgent attacks in Afghanistan have made that country a lethal place for civilians. The useful idiots who protest that Afghan civilians are in as much danger - if not more - from NATO as from the Taliban are not only equating the policeman with the thug he is sent in to arrest. They are also simply wrong; it seems that almost 90 percent of Afghan casualties were killed by the Taliban, not the international forces meant to stop them. From Counting the Dead in Afghanistan:
For the first time, those data are now publicly available. In January, ISAF provided Science with a database of civilian casualties called CIVCAS. It is the military's internal record of the death and injury of Afghan civilians, broken down by month, region, weaponry, and perpetrator. By its reckoning, 2537 civilians were killed and 5594 were wounded over the past 2 years, with 12% of those casualties attributed to ISAF forces and the rest to insurgents. The death toll is 93% identical to that in the WikiLeaks data, revealing
In 1996, at the very tail end of the grunge era, Illinois rockers Local H released a song entitled “Bound For the Floor”. It’s hard to think of a better musical metaphor for the far-left’s response to the crisis in Libya.
“And you just don’t get it/ Keep it copacetic/ And you learn to accept it/ You know/ You’re so pathetic.”
With talk of a humanitarian intervention in Libya, the self-appointed spokesmen of the hard Left have very rarely shown their inability to learn anything as they are now.
Perusing some of the reactions from Rabble.ca, Canada’s far left has decided – quelle suprise! –they oppose a NATO military intervention in Libya. Their solution? Soldarity.
That’s precisely the theme of a StopWar.ca statement published on Rabble.ca by Derrick O’Keefe and written by the Canadian Peace Alliance.
“The Government of Canada has announced that it will send HMCS Charlottetown to Libya to join the US aircraft carrier fleet led by the USS Enterprise,” the CPA writes. “This is part of a much larger NATO led buildup in the area. The Canadian Peace Alliance is opposed to any military intervention in Libya or in the region as...More >>
As the Taliban now run shadow governments in all but one of Afghanistan’s provinces (the Panjshir) amounting to a government-in-waiting, and one by one NATO governments announce their withdrawal dates, there is a glum resolve here among many aid workers that one day very soon the government we may be dealing with in Kabul will be a Taliban one. And so some are starting to seek engagement with the Taliban now, hoping they might be more accommodating than the miserable years of 1996-2001, when the overwhelming majority of organizations fled, and those who stayed, worked within bizarre and frustrating restrictions, many of which barred aid to women and girls. Overall, the restrictions and the fickle and unpredictable behaviour of the host government then meant aid simply could not reach all of the most vulnerable, and many lives were lost as a result.
With the possibility that the Taliban will return to power in whole or in part, humanitarian and social justice organizations are being counseled in some cases to be “neutral” towards the Taliban.
The Truth: The reality is that most of those individuals and organizations insisting that NATO’s role in Afghanistan is an imperial enterprise are unconcerned with what Afghans want. If they were concerned, discovering the opinions, thoughts and ideas of Afghans would have been an early priority when forging a position that influences the actions of our own government, and impacts the lives of Afghan men, women and children.
Though among most stoppists there is little pretending to care about the fate of Afghans, when queried, they will often say something along the lines “they don’t want us there,” despite the evidence to the...More >>
Indiscriminate insurgent attacks in Afghanistan have made that country a lethal place for civilians. The useful idiots who protest that Afghan civilians are in as much danger - if not more - from NATO as from the Taliban are not only equating the policeman with the thug he is sent in to arrest. They are also simply wrong; it seems that almost 90 percent of Afghan casualties were killed by the Taliban, not the international forces meant to stop them. From 
As the Taliban now run shadow governments in all but one of Afghanistan’s provinces (the Panjshir) amounting to a government-in-waiting, and one by one NATO governments announce their withdrawal dates, there is a glum resolve here among many aid workers that one day very soon the government we may be dealing with in Kabul will be a Taliban one. And so some are starting to seek engagement with the Taliban now, hoping they might be more accommodating than the miserable years of 1996-2001, when the overwhelming majority of organizations fled, and those who stayed, worked within bizarre and frustrating restrictions, many of which barred aid to women and girls. Overall, the restrictions and the fickle and unpredictable behaviour of the host government then meant aid simply could not reach all of the most vulnerable, and many lives were lost as a result.
what Afghans want. If they were concerned, discovering the opinions, thoughts and ideas of Afghans would have been an early priority when forging a position that influences the actions of our own government, and impacts the lives of Afghan men, women and children.
