Canada's Soldiers: Little Nancy Boys No Longer!

There are lots of well-informed columns on Ottawa's decision to extend the Afghan mission. Here are two silly ones.

If you’d like to read some nonsense about the extension of Canada’s Afghan mission, check out Terry Glavin’s article in the National Post. Applauding the extension, Glavin writes that Canada “now rejoins the company of the grown-ups in the 43-member International Security Assistance Force … we take our place once again as a leader in the international cause.” The fact that Canadians were acting like little children on Afghanistan will likely come as a surprise to the 2,000 odd soldiers who have spent the last nine years being shot at over there, or to anyone who observes that getting involved in the war in the first was by no means a responsibility Canada had to take. Glavin is pleased with the extension of the mission, but not with its humanitarian aspects. “Let someone else distribute UN gruel bags” he writes (presumably that’s kids’ stuff). “If Canada is to have a role in ‘regional diplomacy’ it should be to ensure that Afghanistan’s regional tormentors are kept at bay and that their Islamist-fascist proxies in Afghanistan are not empowered by any exit-strategy reconciliation deal.” So engage in diplomacy, just not with our opponents, and not in a way that will concede anything. That kind of diplomacy.

Sun Media’s Peter Worthington weighs in with his own bit of twaddle at the end of a very reasonable column speculating that Canadian troops will not likely remain “behind the wire” post-2011, despite government assurances. At his conclusion he drops this illogic bomb: “An oddity of the world today is the most effective soldiers tend to be those from English-speaking countries. That doesn’t mean others aren’t good, but that English-speaking countries produce soldiers who usually win.” The fact that Jamaica’s armed forces strike fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere notwithstanding, Worthington might want to cite some supporting evidence, such as what wars we Anglos have “won” lately. Afghanistan, where nine years of pitched battles have produced no conclusion? Iraq, where Americans preside over seemingly non-stop violence? Or perhaps the Korean War, in which North Korean communists were vanquished most thoroughly, never to trouble us again?