JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It’s always the same with these meaningless imperial wars of America’s.

After chewing up people and resources for years, leaders are fearful of the notion that it was all to no purpose.

You cannot, no matter how much you bomb and kill, reshape an ancient society to your liking.

Only long-term economic growth does that, and war represents the very opposite, destruction.

The Afghanistan invasion was a pointless exercise in vengeance and American arm-pumping.

The UN and NATO only have their names slapped on the pathetic effort because the United States pressured and threatened and cajoled its way into getting them involved.

To this day, no greater physical evidence of the truth is to be found than in the pitifully token commitments of troops by all the American allies, a thousand or two here and there in specially limited roles – not what you would ever see were America’s extreme and hysterical words on the nature of the effort believed by anyone.

Canadians and others died for absolutely nothing here, but no leader would ever have the courage to say so.

But worse, tens of thousands of Afghans were killed by invaders who never understood what they were doing.
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“Steve, when he made that speech in his fishing vest in Kandahar, said ‘We [Canadians] don’t cut and run’. You mean that now, 158 casualties and ten years later, we should cut and run?”

Very revealing when people use loaded terms like “cut and run.”

Who would never describe it in that fashion were Canadian troops or police killing innocents in our streets and roads, and people’s revulsion caused them to yell “stop!”

But that is exactly what “NATO” – America’s human shields against world opinion – has done for years in Afghanistan.

If people at home with the opportunity to inform themselves don’t understand what has happened in Afghanistan – and many do not – how are a bunch of soldiers dumped into a hot, confusing, almost totally alien place supposed to know anything about what they are doing?

In the end, Canadian soldiers died because in government it was said “we owe one to the Pentagon.”

And a man like Harper, the most dishonest and manipulative prime minister in our history, can only appeal to the most unthinking, from-the gut responses in our people with his “cut and run” to cover up the waste and shame of the whole sordid business.