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Events
Germany, of all places, offers military advice to Canada
And you know what Germany? I don’t think so
By Kevin Potvin
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“Berlin begs Ottawa to stay past 2009” in Afghanistan, says the Globe and Mail, to which the appropriate diplomatically-couched reply from Ottawa back to Berlin, reprintable across the front page of the Glock and Heil, is “Ottawa begs Berlin to bug the ‘f’ out.”
Besides the brain-locking shock and awe of Germany presuming to lecture Canada on matters of foreign military deployments, there is also the small matter of the criminal blindness-by-intent of NATO in ignoring all of history to conclude that continued military intervention in Afghanistan is the only way to combat so-called “terrorism” of the kind that very recently nearly struck airport targets in Frankfurt.
When in the days after 9/11 the rabid regime of George W Bush frothed at the mouth and lashed out at rubble-dwelling mountain peasants a world away in the most violent military strike in world history, the world, including Germany, was appropriately shocked and appalled. That reaction was correct: it was wrong to militarily attack Afghanistan in October 2001, and it was monumentally dangerous to world stability. Nothing has happened in the six years since to show the opposite. If anything, events have shown global opinion on the matter was amazingly prophetic and prescient.
There is even less of an argument now to be made in favour of continued military deployments by NATO to Afghanistan than there was in October of 2001, and there wasn’t much then to begin with. Semantic dancing by both Liberals and Conservatives does not hide the crucial fact that all Canadians know, that our initial involvement in this criminal hit on an entirely innocent people and country had everything to do with strictly Canadian political calculations (failure to deploy to Afghanistan would make refusal to deploy to Iraq, on US orders, more difficult), and nothing to do with Afghanistan.
The initial deployment was all about internal Canadian politics, and the continued deployment remains all about internal Canadian politics. Germany has a poor track record when it comes to laying off other nations’ internal politics, and we’d rather not bring up the matter in the first place. Suffice it to say that, given history, the only good that can come from listening to what Germany has to say on international affairs is to learn exactly what not to do.
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