Is it just me, or did John McCallum just take an open potshot at his former boss, PM Paul Martin? From “Eyeing Canada’s Path to War in Afghanistan”, an Ottawa Citizen preview of Tuesday March 11th’s Global TV documentary by Kevin Newman:
Former defence minister John McCallum, in particular, is disarmingly frank, speaking openly about how Canada ended up being stuck with the unenviable job of trying to bring security to the increasingly dangerous province of Kandahar. “We dithered, and so all the safe places were taken and we were left with Kandahar.”
McCallum, of course, is referring to the 2005 committment by the Martin government to take control of NATO’s provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar Province, the most active area of Taliban resistance in Afghanistan proper. So let me translate McCallum’s brief quote:
‘As good Euro-worshipping liberals, we wanted to give the illusion that we were actually doing something in the war on terror, without actually risking much of anything. Unfortunately, the loser PM who led our party into this unbearable political purgatory waited so long to commit, that we couldn’t hide our military in areas they weren’t actually needed (like the Germans, the French, and other Euro sophisticates). If only that damned ditherer weren’t so stupid, we could have continued our preferred policy of unprincipled cowardice.’
Or something like that.
Inherently corrupt Jean Chretien said basically the same thing, but Chretien knew Liberals were in power only so they could steal as much as possible – he never lost sight of that objective so he avoided doing anything that was right.
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