The Canadian Naif
By echoing Bush and Blair, Harper has signaled his intent to commit Canada to their war against a shadowy network of international terrorists intent of destroying us for no reason other than that we are free. This shadowy conspiracy does not exist. There is no chain of command. There is no headquarters. There is no organization whatsoever. All there is are small groups of extremists who exchange ideas, techniques and rhetoric through websites.Be ready for this sort of open mouthed denial from the left and segments of the paleo-right in Canada. These are folks stuck in the paradigm that war involves standing armies, manouver, chains of command and top down structure. The program has moved on.
political cycles
Jihadi ideology in combination with the Islamo-fascist world view is more than sufficient to create the conditions of war without any of the traditional apparatus. By echoing Bush and Blair, Harper demonstrates that he gets it.
It is an early test and Harper has passed it with flying colours. And, I suspect, that the prospect of a twenty meter deep crater in downtown Toronto or at the Pickering nuclear station may convince even the most wide eyed Kumbaya singers that this is not about some kids out for a little wilding.
Or not. Political cycles is so desperate to cling to his illusion that there is not monster under the Canadian bed that he is willing to waste pixels analyzing rhetoric rather than face the reality.
Look forward to more of this sort of non-thought.
To get an appreciation of what is really happening go to the CounterTerrorism blog and start reading…
I agree that wars have changed a lot since WWII. It’s not just about standing armies – events in Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, (amongst others) has proven that.
But Political Cycles has a point – there is not a huge criminal terrorist conspiracy out there. There ARE small, independently operating groups; some of which may have tenuous links to each other. As far as I can tell, he’s not saying there’s no monster under the Canadian bed, he’s saying that it’s a little hard to fit the Canadian Forces under the mattress. With the exception of a few very screwed up countries, there is no terrorist base of operations to attack with your armies.
In a round-about way, you are both making the same point. This is not war as our grandfathers knew it; it’s the Cold War revisited, where the major roles are played by the intelligence services and the police. The Europeans are familiar with the terrorist aspects of this ‘game’ – it’s only new to North Americans. The primary difference is that in the Cold War, the USSR existed. There was an actual state that wore the big black hat and controlled its minions. But this time there is no state. Today’s spies and terrorist cells don’t exist in a vacuum, of course, but they wear their own little black hats now – they’re not just bullets from someone’s else’s gun anymore.
A proficient organization of cells would be indistinguishable – insofar as anything we might learn in open sources – from small, loosely or unassociated splinters of discontent. No matter. If small groups is all there are, small groups are what we’ll exterminate.
Uh, what “test” has Harper passed, exactly? This “investigation” has apparently been going on long before Harper became Prime Minister.
I don’t get the connection, at all.
Could you explain?