To clarify: I was referring in the abstract to the celebration of jingoism, not the Afghan mission in particular. My point is that it is a distortion of history to say that Canadians have never celebrated military achievements in the past, or never will again should the occasion arise.
"I do find the celebration of needless death abroad, both of our soldiers and their civilians, contemptible."
You still don't get it. The people on those bridges paying homage to the soldiers aren't celebrating death. You may think they are, but it doesn't make it so. Why don't you join them some time and actually ask them how they feel rather than judge them from a safe distance? But I suspect that it's easier for you to take solace in the base, unjustified assumptions you have about people who don't completely share your worldview. You wouldn't be one of those people who stupidly refuse to wear a poppy because you feel it "celebrates death", are you? Because if you are, then you're even more ignorant than your posts make you out to be.
"The mission is in aid of imperialism"
Ah yes, the old leftist, anti-western canard reveals itself, the classic argument for doing nothing, which other base, two-faced lying hypocrites like you conveniently disregard when advocating for intervention in, say, Darfur. So when *prior* to 9/11 (as Lawrence Wright's book makes clear), the Taliban was executing female teachers and whatnot, these people meant nothing to you. Would advocating on their behalf then have constituted imperialism? Or is it only imperialism when it's an American-led, NATO approved and UN sanctioned mission? Or do you have problems with those organizations too? Did you oppose the NATO bombing of Kosovo as well? Or is the only instance of death of others palatable to you when western nations ignore them, only to leap into your "anti-imperialism" schtik when, *gasp*, it's the evil Americans leading the charge to stop it? Bottom line is, what would you have done as an alternative? Shake hands with Mullah Omar, Jack Layton-style, and hope for the best?
"Afghanistan took the brunt because we knew Osama bin Laden was there"
Brilliant. First intelligent thing you've said thus far.
"though the record quite clearly shows the immediate preferred target of the Bush Administration was Iraq, right from the start"
Nice try, trying to conflate the issue here with a red herring, and you know it. Of course, when it's the *other* side trying to conflate the two, you would, naturally, call them on it. Stick to the issue.
"I worked with a guy who was gung-ho on the mission"
You worked with a *guy*. What guy? Was he a soldier? A policy analyst, what? A fellow stock guy? I thought this kind of argumentation left the forum along with miketoronto and his cousins in Philly.
"By and large, "they" are the civilians in Afghanistan (and, for the US and UK, Iraq), who are paying the price in tens of thousands of deaths that would not have occurred without the invasion"
If you really and truly believe this, if you *really* believe that without outside intervention there wouldn't be an equal number of deaths, if not more, due to the Taliban and other elements in a country already in a state of pretty-much perpetual civil war, then you're hopeless. Again, my question to you is, what was the alternative? Walk away from a country known for harbouring terrorists, and run by a genocidal regime that destroys world heritage sites and had *deliberately* targeted a large section of its population for execution? Would your conscience be salved then, or is it truly as sanctimonious and hypocritical as it's appearing? Again, do you only care about the deaths of other people only when the "Anglosphere" is somehow involved, even if indirectly and despite measures taken to prevent them? Do you really hate the west that much, or would you rather have, say, Russia and France fill the void? Think Putin's boys would show as much restraint and care in their operations as the Canadians and the Brits?
"Rather than deal with the Saudis, though, we've attacked proxy nations that had nothing to do with 9/11, whatsoever, aside from happening to be A) where Osama hung his hat, and B), countries with just scads of oil, or the potential to pipeline it to friendly ports, avoiding troublesome neighbours (interesting that Iran seems to be next...), and C) full of brown people who don't think, believe, or talk like us, and so are unfortunately discountable as human beings by those in power: witness their blithe demotion to "collateral damage" in the Western press."
Point a): not bad, most people will say we *should* have gone after Saudi, no argument there, but for example, aside from a post-Monika cum shot missile strike on the Sudan, not much was done there. Mind you Osama *was* expelled after the west, via other Arab nations, leaned on the Sudanese after the embassy bombings in 1998. That damn Anglosphere again...and Iran? Not even close, much as the Chomsky crowd *wants* it to happen. And let's be clear, Afghanistan had *scads* to do with 9/11 insofar as it was the cockpit within which Osama, Zawahiri and others were able to train their operatives. It's like arguing during WWII we shouldn't have invaded Germany via France because France had nothing to do with the invasion of Poland. Point b) The old blood for oil argument. Fine, yes, lean on that crutch if you will, but consider this: do you really think that if bin Laden was hiding in, say, Pakistan (which he might...it's actually Pakistan that's on the next hit list) that efforts wouldn't have been focused there? Or Sudan, if he was still there? Again, I agree with you on the Saudi point, and many analyists actually *resent* Bush and co for *not* going after them. But that wrong does not, of itself, lend credence to your argument. It's a non-sequiter at best. c) Well, given you've already tarred large numbers of people with one brush, not surprising you'd assume that all western foreign policy is white-supremicist based. Clearly your mind operates in the most simple, didactic terms, so nothing I can say will make you deviate from that. Just remember though that when you chomp at the bit at someone for stereotyping vizimins, you and that person are essentially looking at reflections of one another, mentally speaking.
"people in Toronto think it's just dandy for Canadian soldiers to go off and help kill thousands of people in Afghanistan (and get killed themselves in the process), effectively facilitating the murder of hundreds of thousands more in Iraq by freeing up troops to serve there"
Couldn't help yourself, could you? Once again conflating the two. Going back to Chretien's original deployment of JTF2 to Afghanistan, it was always, *always* made clear, through Liberal and Conservative governments, that Canadian deployment to Afghanistan had nothing to do with Iraq. Nothing, zilch, zero. The only ones joining the two are people like you who didn't want *any* kind of action taken, at all, due to vague resentment and hostility of *any* sort of western intervention in *any* third world country, for reasons I suspect going back to cold-war era Soviet intervention in said (ahem, Afghanistan) countries. You wave this anti-imperialism argument like some blunderbuss, thinking it applies to every situation at every time, when it doesn't. It's a clumsy, faulty, and extremely limited lens through which to examine world politics, but for small, lazy minds trapped in a linear, doctrinaire mode of thinking.
"much the same way as the Boer War once was"
What relevance does this have? Apples. Oranges. Look into it.
"not something ugly we'd left behind 50 years ago"
What does this mean? 50 years ago we were in the thick of it, in Europe, in Korea, in the Sinai, operating under UN and NATO auspices. Now, back then, you would probably would have been one of those on the fringes of the CCF advocating withdrawl from both, which is fine if you want to adopt a morally vacuous neutrality (and I'm sure Kim il Sung would have thanked you for it. The Soviets too, for that matter.)
"supporting the continued torture of a "failed state" that's never been given more than a generation or two of peace to get its act together in hundreds of years"
That sounds to me like you really don't care about the development of Afghanistan as long as countries like the US, Canada and others aren't involved with it. Are you advocating withdrawl? Are you advocating we do nothing? Just come out and say it then. At least have the honesty to do that, because all you've done is skirt the issue here. Come out and say, I don't give a shit about what happens to that country because it was a mess before, will be again, only I can say we have no blood on our hands and am content to letting the Taliban, or some other group of nutbars that will fill the void do their thing, but hey, I'm not cool with "imperialism" and so I can feel all nice and smug that the tens of thousands of people who will *still* die for an Islamic death state at least didn't do so at the hands of Canadians. Well, fine and dandy then. I invite you, at the next procession along the 401, to present that argument to those on the bridge.
