Even if you’re not a news junkie, by now you’ve surely heard of the plans to blow up multiple flights from the UK to the US that were foiled by police.

It’s hard to imagine the people that plot these attacks. I sat in my backyard and tried to, listening to cars rushing by on Main Street and scattered bits of conversation that floated on the wind in this busy downtown.

Busy, but peaceful. This is the contrast between Canadian life and the lives of the people who seek to explode airliners full of children and parents, sleepy businesspeople and touring twenty-somethings. Their dangerous, secretive lives are like fiction to most of us, except for the people in law enforcement and intelligence services whose job it is to protect us.

A British Airways 747 – not necessarily the type of plane targeted

Clearly it’s law enforcement we have to thank for uncovering this plot and arresting those responsible (hopefully, all of them). Once again, thousands of innocents have been saved by police.

It’s often this way: police on Western soil trying to catch people who want to kill Westerners, and being mostly successful. In spite of this, it’s the military that always seems to be at the forefront of the “war on terror”.

But how many terror plots against the West has the American military foiled in Iraq? What are the chances that those arrested for the UK airliner plot are Iraqi, Lebanese, or Afghani?

Bush had this to say, which I believe he memorized in late September, 2001 and has been repeating ever since:

The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.

Clearly, Bush is talking about you and me. We both love freedom, right? The only people who hate freedom are “Islamic fascists”. (Which begs the question: why are we putting them in jail? If they hate freedom so much, surely they love captivity.)

We’re not like them, Bush says. Westerners love freedom and peace. But Western bombs keep raining down on the Middle East and South-West Asia. Is that really helping to protect us?

Perhaps we should focus on policing to keep us safe, instead of military invasions and occupations, while seeking to solve problems elsewhere in ways that don’t involve more killing.

[tags]Heathrow, London, security, police, politics, Canada[/tags]

I came across this funny but sad comment on a Globe and Mail story today about how some Afghans are not terribly fond of Canadians:

Just like in the 1968 Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, when it became necessary for the Americans to destroy the city of Ben Tre in order to save it from the Viet Cong, it looks like Canada may have to destroy Afghanistan in order to save it from the Taliban.

The Afghans won’t be too happy about it now, but I’m confident they’ll look back in a few years after we’ve wiped out the Taliban and have a laugh or two about it. Sure they won’t have much of a country left, and there probably won’t be too many Afghans left either, due to “collateral damage”, but undoubtedly the few surviving Afghans will look back on these days with a wistful smile, much as Londoners look back on the London Blitz of World War 2 as the best days of their lives.

What we need is an Afghan Vera Lynn to croon the Afghan equivalent of “We’ll Meet Again” to get the Afghans feeling better about the whole thing.

Attributed to Jim Terrets from Vancouver.

[tags]Canada, Afghanistan[/tags]

From the Ottawa Citizen:

Three NATO soldiers killed in a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades in southern Afghanistan have been identified as Canadian, DND reported Thursday.

Six other NATO soldiers were injured in the attack, but there was no immediate confirmation that Canadians were among them. No details on the identities of the three NATO soldiers were immediately available.

The three dead are in addition to another Canadian soldier who died Thursday when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. Four other Canadians were also injured in that attack.

This is in addition to 21 Afghan civilians killed. From Bloomberg:

Twenty-one Afghan civilians and four soldiers with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan were killed today, the government and military said.

In the bloodiest incident, the civilians died and 13 people were injured in a car bombing at a market in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, said in a telephone interview from Kabul. A Canadian soldier was killed in a blast and three other ISAF soldiers died later in a firefight in the same region, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force said.

Another sad day for Canada and Afghanistan.

Stephen Colbert:

Pollsters are claiming that many Canadians disagree with Prime Minister Harper’s support for Israeli aggression against Hezbollah. According to the Strategic Counsel poll in today’s Globe and Mail, 45% of Canadians polled do not approve of his support. The poll also claims that three quarters of Canadians want their country to remain neutral in this latest Middle East conflict.

I have my reservations about popular opinion polls. In fact, I am downright cynical.

Do I think Canadians fundamentally disagree with the Prime Minister? Do they support neutrality because it makes sense? No, on both counts.

The poll questions are abstractions. They do not provide clarity. In fact, I think they muddy the waters for many Canadians, reducing our present role in the world to the lowest common denominator of our history.

For the last decade, the form and function of our nation’s role in the world has remained static. Informally, Canadians cling to the vaporous idea of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers. Formally, there has not been a foreign policy review in this country since 1994.

If, for example, peacekeeping is going to be an essential form of Canadian foreign policy, then we must define the function of that peacekeeping in modern conflicts. We have not adapted Canadian foreign policy tools like peacekeeping for contemporary conflicts. As a result, Canadian foreign policy has not advanced and the public is not able to comprehend Canada’s potential role in the current conflict in the Middle East. We do not know what peacekeeping in Lebanon means.

Anachronistic notions have become a substitute for clear action. The Strategic Counsel poll is a stunning example. It does not reflect any clear options for Canada in the current conflict. The poll is a reaffirmation of Canadian foreign policy from the early 1990s, asking questions framed on the subjects of neutrality, consistency, peacekeeping, and support for either side of the conflict.

The current conflict in Lebanon does not have clearly defined sides. It challenges the meaning of neutrality, and changes too quickly to warrant consistency.

If this poll indicates anything, it is that we have an abstract way of discussing Canada’s role in the world. It is not informative, and as a gauge of popular opinion, it is irrelevant. Worse, it pulls our attention away from the more fundamental problem: that we really don’t know what we’re going to do in Lebanon.

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This post was written by alevo

[tags]Israel, Lebanon, Canada, politics, foreign policy[/tags]