Harper confirms Afghan mission not just (at all) about Canadian interests
"Your work is about more than just defending Canada's national interests."
CBC

Canadian Leadership: Leadership of What? There will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way and it's not the Canadian way... We don't make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble. Like Earl McRaeving of the Ottawa Sun, Stephen Harper seems to think that Canadians who oppose his beloved Afghan mission are jelatinous wimps panic stricken because one of our soldiers in Afghanistan was hit on the head with an axe and two others were killed in a road accident. Sorry to sound callous about it, but that is far from our concern. Every violent death is a tragedy. But if Canadians want to do something to diminish the sum total of violent deaths, they'd be better employed trying to shut down the British Columbia forest industry (43 killed in 2005) than worrying about our troops in Afghanistan (11 dead in three years). What we do object to about Canada's stealthly commitment to war in Afghanistan is (a) the cost, and (b) the policy. As to the cost, we're already on the hook for several billions, and given Stephen Harper's enthusiam for piloting military transport planes, sending bureaucrats and ministers to Afghanistan on PR jaunts, we could see that number soon rise. It has been estimated that the U.S. war on Iraq will have an eventual total cost of $2 trillion. Consider that in one hundred dollar bills. An inch of 100's is $10,000, so a million is a stack over eight feet high. A billion would stack up to over a mile and a half, so two trillion would extend three thousand miles into space, many times the distance from Earth to the international space station. Harper may not be as spendthrift as his fellow Conservatives G. Bush (U.S. public approval, 37%) or straight shooter, Dick Cheney (U.S. public approval rating, 18%) but if Canadian spending in Afghanistan were eventually to total only a tenth of America's per capita Iraq-war investment, it would still amount to 20 billion. That's real money. But just as important is the policy. It may be great for the Afghans to be lifted from poverty at the point of a gun, but is it our business to do the lifting? Isn't there some idea that gaining and defending freedom is up to the individual and the community, not to foreigners with funny ideas about a woman's right to choose, homosexual marriage, etc. The Afghans have been poverty-stricken homophobes living under a patriachal system for many thousands of years now, and have lived under oppressive rulers for exactly 100% of that time. So if they carry on as they are for another few years, should we be so concerned? And if we should, what about everywhere else that people are poor and oppressed? That is that question that exposes the fraud underlying Stephen Harper's rhetoric. We cannot prevent all the evil and suffering in the world and we have no intention of trying. Thus we can surely conclude that Harper's humanitarian, nation-building blather is simply the best available cover for supporting America's imperial expansion into central Asia. So when Stephen Harper says "[it] is also about demonstrating an international leadership role for our country", the real question for Canadians is: leadership in what? In particular, do you want to see Canada spend money showing international leadership in nation-building here at home, providing better daycare, eliminating the fiscal imbalance, reducing hospital wait times, etc., etc., or should we be showing leadership in America's aggressive world war of imperial expansion? One thing you can be sure of, Stephen Harper is not going to discuss that question. But at least he seems to have abandoned the "They attacked us on 9/11" argument, presumably because he knows that Canadian know it isn't true. That at least is progress in the education of Stephen Harper. Permanent Link

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