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Saturday February 9, 2008
Canada's government is in a failed state
No
party is seen as fit to run the country, and yet they think they can do
effective "mission"- ary work in other people's countries
The Edmonton
Sun says:
The
[Manley] panel's recommendation provides political cover to the
minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for
maintaining Canada's present commitment to the UN-mandated and NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, when
the opposition parties are pushing for an end to it.
The article goes
on to parrot
Stephen Harper
that if Canadians were properly educated on the issues they would
understand why the mission needs to be extended, presumably
indefinitely.
But instead of helping to educate, the writer regurgitates the standard
propaganda - you know - about how girls are going to school and roads
have been built (from Kabul to the pipeline).
As the Seattle
Post Intelligencer says, "If only". Girls are going to
school now the same way they did under the Taliban, in private homes.
To be sure, there is a road called Highway No. 1 that runs between
Kabul and Kandahar - which is situated at the pipeline (see
the map) - and that cost a lot to build, but it is a
perilous route (NYT) nevertheless. And there is no
mention of a Highway No. 2.
The
Freudian slip in the use of the term "cover" suggests the Sun is aware
of the true purpose of the Manley report - not to provide an
unbiased assessment but to bolster the Conservative agenda.
Calling
the area "strategically important" is a dead giveaway of the reason for
the whole debacle, and evoking 9/11 is not enough of a distraction from
that.
Who isn't
aware that
Afghanistan is a jumping off point for restructuring the whole Middle
East to suit the interests of transnational corporations?
But the prize for sheer gall and arrogance goes to this statement by
the Sun:
Rich
democracies, including Canada, have been slow in recognizing the need
for intervention and peace-enforcement operations by deploying combat
forces in failed states for human security, while assisting in state
rebuilding.
Afghanistan was
not a
"failed state" until the US bombed it to rat poop. But it was
ruled by
a government that didn't take orders from the US. Had the Taliban
nicely complied and shared its rule with American corporations, the US
wouldn't have given a fig about little girls going to school, or any of
the other choice excuses now used to cover these horrific crimes
against humanity.
Little wonder that there is
growing support for the Taliban (ABC) in proportion to Afghanis'
growing resentment against the foreign invaders.
Saying
that the
members of
the Manley panel are respected merely suggests they know what they're
talking about. It doesn't make it so. Manley was supposed
to have
been a Liberal, but only a hard line conservative can stomach him, or
any of the apologists for war that served on his panel.
After consulting privately with Harper, Dion and his Liberals are going
to come up with some amendments to the PM's extension proposal, which Dion
says the PM had better accept or there'll be an election, so there!
But Michael Ignatieff gave away the game when he
...
questioned whether it was "in the national interest for us to plunge
the country into a bitter election on an issue where Canadians, I think
desperately, right across the partisan divide, want us to pull together
and do our jobs as politicians."
When the Allcons
and
the Libcons are pulling together you know they're cut from the same
smelly rag. Neither one of them is going to want an election when
they
know they
can't win a majority.
So look for a carefully crafted and suitably vague position on the war
from the Liberals that will allow for just about anything to happen in
2009 while claiming to want to avoid combat.
No doubt the major contributor to that work will be Ignatieff himself,
of whom The Tyee
said so eloquently:
I
disagree, he seems to say, but it's not what you think.
The media, ever
sensational and hungry to sell copy, like to make it out as a huge
confrontation - which is not to say it can't become one
accidentally.
With any luck, for them, the story of JFK's
illegitimate Canadian son will pick up steam, and Canadians won't
even know what hit them with regard to Afghanistan.
But when the US-installed government of Kabul votes
against Canada at the UN (NPost)
and seems to favour Iran over anything we may contributed to the
benefit of Afghanistan, you have to wonder why we keep hearing from the
media that we're doing a lot of good over there.
A sign that Canada is on the road to failure as a democracy is that its
newspapers actually pay people to parrot war propaganda and warp the
truth into virtual lies.
Other stuff of interest:
Thanks
to Reader John of Manitoba:
Znet: The
war that can bring neither peace nor freedom
The crisis of the Afghan occupation is a reminder of its fraudulent
claims, growing cost in blood, and certainty of failure
MWCNews: Let us Prey
"When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had
the land. They said "let us close our eyes and pray." When we opened
them, we had the Bible, and they had the land.” —Desmond Tutu
Feb.
9/08: NYT: Bhutto’s Party Disputes Scotland Yard Report on Her Death
Despite
the lack of a full post-mortem and limited X-rays and other forensic
material, the two British forensic investigators leading the team were
able to draw reliable conclusions, the executive summary said.
YYC: Whoever wrote that could moonlight as a comedian.
See the Bhutto
Page for earlier news items.
yayacanada
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