This isn’t the end of any national innocence. It would insult Canadians to suggest it is. Throughout the decade of Canadian Forces intervention in Afghanistan, every military officer there said the fight there was designed, partly, to avoid one here. But you can’t keep a country on lockdown, not while preserving the things that made the country worth having in the first place.
Much like its capital precinct, Canada is a big open field, too.
– Paul Wells, Macleans
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“Throughout the decade of Canadian Forces intervention in Afghanistan . . .”
Ummmm, if we want to understand what went on in the Parliament Buildings yesterday we will have to go farther back than Paul Wells and Macleans!
To wit:
T. E. Lawrence was an English archaeologist with experience in the Levant, a part of the then Ottoman Empire. He spoke the language of the area fluently.
As a result, at out break of war in 1914, he was given a commission in the British army to rouse the local population against the Turks.
He did that, very successfully, essentially by making promises he had no authority to make and could not keep.
At 1919 Versailles meeting, where the allies divvied up the spoils of war, he appeared in Arab garb.
To no avail!
The Allies ignored Lawrence’s Arab tribes by installing the horror we are grappling with today and, thousands of miles away we, not so innocent, suffer the blow back!
There is a correlation between Harper sending a squadron of bombers to Syria and the gunning down of our noble men yesterday that, no doubt, we wish to brush under the rug!
How on earth did a man like Stephen Joseph Harper ever become prime minister of Canada?
First Past the Post.