Noam Chomsky on why Canada is in Afghanistan

Too bad he didn't answer your question.

Essentially he says Canada's just going along with whatever the US and UK think is best. He really doesn't know anything specific about the Canadian government's motives.

Well he did say he did not think it was the pipeline.

Thanks for asking the questions.

No, what he said is this:

On the invasion of Afghanistan and the continued occupation, I think the answer is almost as simple as that. To suggest Canada had some "separate" interest in October 2001 from that of simply answering GWB's call would require a whole lot of convincing proof. Now, if Chomsky had cited "reflexive support" as an explanation for Canadian foreign policy in general, under various political regimes, I think we could have accused him of ignorance or oversimplification - but I don't see that he did that in this context. In short, I think he's quite correct.

If Chomsky thinks that its simply that Canada reflexively follows whatever the US and UK do - then I wonder why he thinks we refused to send any troops to Iraq?

Well, he said Canada "almost reflexively supports the US" (not the UK) - and he was answering a question about Afghanistan. And I think his answer in that context was completely accurate.

As for why Canada is still there, it has a lot to do with people and parties calling themselves progressive who are ambiguous about fighting for Canadian withdrawal. Know what I mean?

Of course, if you actually do wonder why he thinks we didn't send troops to Iraq, you could ask him. But what makes me think you don't really wonder?

Good question. Someone should ask him.

That said, Canada did send troops to Iraq, US Army ones. Canadian participation in the Afghan project released at whole division for deployment in Iraq, troops that otherwise would have had to be in Afghanistan. In fact, your rhetorical device sheds some light on parts of the political device in play. Among other things it creates the impression that there are other (greater) purposes at play in Afghanistan than in Iraq, and so softens the political punch of the deployment because it can be posed as a "mission" seperate from the mission in Iraq, which was clearly hostile, in favour of a view where the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is about peacekeeping, policing, restoring the social order and protecting humanitarian projects.

At the time of the US invasion of Iraq, we were already knee deep in Afghanistan, why create more stink and more problems, by making a new and seperate deployment? A single division on active duty is about all we can supply and maintain overseas anyway. A new deployment would have meant a whole new budgetary request. CAF is small, so splitting up the command and logistics structure, is obviously foolish and expensive. Why not just relieve the Americans in Afghanistan, so they can move in on Iraq?

No Fidel? You actually think that the US would not have had to increase its troop deployment in Afghanistan, at the expense of sending troops to Iraq, or would have had to find them elsewhere, raise a higher levy out of the Reserve or find new allies. Sending troops to Afghanistan was as good as sending them to Iraq, as far as Uncle Sam was concerned.

I didn't say anything about the NDP, the Liberals and the decision to send troops to Iraq. I especially don't remember Paul Martin being forced to turn down the request, because Jean Chretien was in office when the US invaded Iraq. What I was talking about was the reason that Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, but did not send them to Iraq, the question that Stockholm asked.

In fact, we traded increased combat commitment in Afghanistan, for commitment to Iraq, since combat missions seperate from the ISAF missions began shortly after the US invaded in Afghanistan. Combat missions that were previously being conducted by US troops, then commited to Iraq, were then being done with Canadian forces.

This is a very simple pie Fidel.

Who cares? That has nothing to do with question being posed Chomsky, or Stockholm's additional question along the same lines, which is about the geostrategic reasoning behind Canada support for the invasion of Afghanistan, and its apparent lack of support for the war in Iraq. Fact is, Canada directly helped send US troops to Iraq by towing the line in Afghanistan, and by increasing troop commitment when the Marines pulled out to go to Iraq. Both operations are part and parcel of the same political animal called "the war on terror".

Have you heard of it?

No. We didn't send tropps to Iraq because they were better off in Afghanistan pinch-hitting for US troops redeployed to Iraq. In fact our commitement to Iraq is far more substantial than many of the so called "coalition of the willing" countries, whose commitments are so small they relieve hardly any US combat duties at all. We met our deployment capability in one substantial self contained military expeditionary force, and there was no need to break it up in smaller parcels to be ferried off to other operational areas in penny-packets for "goodwill" gestures in support of the coalition of the willing.

In this way several of the top supporters of the coalition of the willing get to pretend they are not involved, when they actually are some of the biggest contributors to the invasion of Iraq, yet for the sake of political convenience, they get to pretend they have done nothing, these include Germany, France, and Canada, all of which are sent US troops to Iraq through this very clever bit of adminstrative slieght of hand.

This point about releasing US troops has even been made by members of George Bush's own adminstration. It is not even a secret of any kind. So much was implied even by Liberals at the time, as far as I was remember. Our presence in Afghanitan compensated for not going to Iraq substantially. We even increased our troop commitment and expanded our role into direct combat operations just after the war in Iraq began.

Well I'm sure the Liberals tried to sell it that way, that they were "better off" stationed in the Stan than Iraq.  But the truth is that when the Liberals lied to Canadian Parliament about Canadian troops' new and aggressive US-style combat roles in Southern Afghanistan, Canadian troops began being murdered at a frenzied pace starting in 2006

Yes,  a Canadian Corporal was killed by a suicide bomber near Kabul in 2004. Alarm bells should have gone off for Layton and the NDP at that point in the slaughter.

That's the excuse that is given. It is a straw man argument, a fallacy. Here's where it falls:

NATO is a military organization. It's original purpose was defense. The "attack" it envisaged on the whole or one of its members was a military attack. 9/11 was not a military attack or invasion; it was an act of terror. According to international law, a terrorist attack is not a military attack. A terrorist attack is a crime. The U.S.A.'s, the U.K.'s, Canada's etc. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was an inapropriate response. The Afghan war is illegal.

But neither Canada nor America were attacked by Afghanistan. And bombing and invading a desperately poor country under a false pretense that they did attack America on 9/11 was a violation of Nuremberg code and Geneva Convention. That didnt seem to matter to our vicious toadies at the time though. Crazy George commanded our Liberals to jump, and they asked, "How high, Uncle Sam?" without demanding any proof or evidence whatsoever that either Canada or the USsA was seriously threatened by a specific country.

Since the end of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1945, countries are supposed to have a very good reason for bombing and marching their armies into a sovereign country. Crazy George Bush II did not have a valid reason. There is still no internationally accepted legal evidence that any of Afghanistan or the radical Islamic wing of the CIA, "al-Qa'eda" were directly and solely responsible for having perpetrated a terrorist attack on 9/11.

The lesson the 1991 Iraq War I (or Gulf War I) taught America was how to build an international coalition when it came to war. The U.S. found a way to avoid being a social pariah like it was in Vietnam. 1992 saw the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. In 1994, the Rwandan genocide took place. The Clinton administration State Department and (even more so) the Pentagon saw NATO as a means of carrying out the American Empire's Imperialist Mannifest Destiny with the cooperation of Canada and Europe. The U.S. also saw NATO as a means of circumventing the U.N.

After Rwanda, the U.S. came up with this "Responsibility to Protect" concept which contravenes the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and international law concerning aggressive war. NATO, whose mandate is peacemaking (war) and not the U.N. whose mandate is peacekeeping (trying to end war through relatively peaceful means), was chosen as the organization to implement the Responsibility to Protect concept.

The first test came in 1999 when NATO waged aggressive war in Kosovo. During the cold war, the mandate of NATO was to protect its Western European allies from a feared Russian "invasion". 1999 is the date that the old NATO morphed into the testosterone dripping super NATO we know today. NATO became aggressive in attempting to isolate Russia by encouraging Eastern European, Caucasus and Central Asian countries to join. It was the Kosovo War, in fact where the term "peacmaking" entered our vocabulary and way of thinking.

We all know how the U.S. used NATO after 9/11 in 2001 to get Canada and all of Western Europe and now most of the former Warsaw Pact Eastern European countries to join in the Afghan war and how, apart from the U.S. (although some American units are serving under NATO) they are fighting in Afghanistan under the banner of NATO.