The soldiers have spoken: Peace through airstrikes is a dangerous delusion
It was a bad week for the bomb-and-bombast set.
For quite some time, the Conservative Party of Canada has pushed the line that ending the bombing mission against ISIS was not only a mistake, but somehow craven.
It was Conservative MP Kellie Leitch who claimed that Justin Trudeau’s non-combat mission made the Canadian military look like “cowards” on the international stage. Canada was not re-tooling the mission, it was retreating from it.
That position was parroted by more than a few news agencies, including the CBC. If you couldn’t bomb ISIS, who could you bomb? Commentators claimed that bombing was still the best option for Canada, pointing to polls that showed most Canadians disagreed with bringing home the F-18s. It was as if the October 19 election had never taken place and Justin Trudeau had not repeatedly promised during the campaign to recall the warplanes.
Then, a surprise guest appeared smack in the middle of this emotional and profoundly important debate — the Canadian commander who led NATO in southern Afghanistan ten years ago, retired Maj.-Gen. David Fraser.
The bomb-aholics were gobsmacked. As reported by Murray Brewster of Canadian Press, Fraser said if he had to do it all over again, he would have left the Taliban government in power and simply concentrated on hunting down al Qaida. Fraser, it seems, had seen the ruinous consequences of “regime change” up close and personal. All it accomplished in Afghanistan was the creation of a “30 to 40 year problem” across that country and the entire Middle East.
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