DarrenBarefoot.com

Brem makes my point better than I could. What is meant by “support”? I wish them a speedy resolution with a minimum of casualties on BOTH sides, as I would in any military endeavour, but that does not mean I agree with the reasons given for their involvement.

[Reply]

I support the people doing the work, not necessarily the people directing the work.

It’s like the fact that I really like Americans, as people, but I really dislike the current administration.

I hope every one of our troops is safe and is doing the best job they can. I hope their families are safe, able to get by, and will see their loved one(s) return. I also hope that the people in charge are considering all options and figuring out which ones will lead to long-term peace rather than an endless cycle of fighting.

Another example would be that I don’t have any issues with the customer service people at Telus when I have to talk with them and they can’t help me. They can’t help me because the people in charge have made it that way. It’s not their the handler’s fault that they are not equipped to deal with my situation.

A twist on “Don’t shoot the messenger” perhaps? The soldier is delivering the message, but he certainly didn’t write it.

Aside -> Was Harper wearing lipstick again when you saw him on the TV?

Darren said:
“How can something be bad at the macro level but supportable at the micro level?”

You started out talking about the “troops” and finished by talking about the cause.

[Reply]

“How can something be bad at the macro level but supportable at the micro level?”

Easy.

My mom runs a church food bank that feeds hundreds of people in the Okanagon every year, which I support of course, but I’m not a big fan of organized religion in general.

What if someone signed up for the army a few years ago, when Canada was known as a peace-keeping nation, and then a few years later our Fearless Leader chooses to invade a random country full of brown people because of a perceived (non-existant) threat. If I disagree with said invasion, do I really blame the soldiers because “that’s what they signed up for”?

I’m “for the troops” in that I’d rather they not get killed. I think Afghanistan is unwinnable - the Soviets had 15000 deaths and 35000 injuries over 10 years, and there were an estimated 1.8 million Afghans killed. Will our 2300 troops fare much better?

[Reply]

I think you could say that you want CF troops to be doing good in the world, to be equipped well and trained properly for the missions they’re given. You can say you want them to be safe and to bring safety to others (though let’s face it all armies are trained to cause mass death - that’s what war is).

But you can say all that while not agreeing with the missions they are given. I think ‘I support the troops’ is an automatic defense that people have to give when saying they object to the war or they risk exactly the kind of accusation that Harper and others would tar them with - that disagreement with the army’s political masters is tantamount to treason and a betrayal of the military. That’s bullshit.

In the case of Afghanistan, the political arm accepted a task we could not face alone, and in doing so have put the troops into unreasonable harm without much hope of success. I disagree with that, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t suppor the troops.

What I’d like to see is a good definition of what ’supporting the troops’ means, as I suspect there would be a lot of them and that the whole concept is little more than hollow rhetoric used to beat the other side up.

[Reply]

Standing by our troops is almost a religious duty in Canada and the US. But, that does not mean we should not question the missions they are on. If we do not do this, it takes away any sensible debate that might occur about the right missions for the Canadian forces.

[Reply]

Does Harper actually think about what he says. “We don’t start fights but we finish them” I’m presuming that means that the Afghans attacked Canada and Canada had no option but to get involved to the point of no return i.e Canada is the victor and the enemy is vanquished.

It appears that the “Peacekeeping” mission in Afghanistan has turned into a “War” mission with the sad result that(young)Canadian soldiers are returning home in body bags. No doubt very young Afghans are also being killed in vast numbers.

Afghanistan has been fought over by any number of people for centuries. For Harper to maintain that “We won’t leave until they’re done” is ironic coming from a pudgy man in a suit who hardly lacks in creature comforts and resides safely out of harms way many miles away from a land which has been abused by so many outsiders and insiders.

Well Stephen I’d like to see a real commitment from your government if you still insist on getting involved in the fight, in a true “Peacekeeping” force(with nerves of steel) which builds schools/hospitals etc. Commits to protecting that force with armed forces which in turn protects that infrastructure.

I say this only if we insist on getting involved.

Internal conflicts are best resolved by the participants themselves perhaps with pressure from outsiders (Strong border controls to reduce weapon supplies/opening up Western markets to Afghan goods/addressing the Western Worlds insatiable appetite for heroin etc etc)

No easy tasks but surely far more wortwhile than hollow sounding breast beating rhetoric from an individual who I hope can sleep well at night with the senseless deaths of Canadian soldiers even if they have “signed” up for the job.

[Reply]

Metro, so you prefer taliban torture to american torture?

[Reply]

I think the whole “support our troops” line emerged out of Vietnam, when in the U.S. at least many soldiers were shocked when they returned home to be vilified and in some cases actually spit upon by protesters and others who disagreed with the war.

Previously, no one really questioned that you would support (i.e. respect) the troops, because in Korea and World War II and before, everyone was expected to support not only the troops but also the war. And at the time it made a lot of sense.

But the past 35 years are a different era, a less certain one, when democratic governments wage wars that significant portions of their populations oppose. We have had to bifurcate our thinking about soliders and wars. If we think the Iraq and Afghanistan missions are bad, would we spit on the soliders coming home? I wouldn’t.

Let’s take Darren’s Nazi example and make it personal. My grandfather was a footsolider in the Nazi army. As far as I know he shot guns in battles, as did many in the Allied armies, and he ran no gas chambers and captured no Jews. He himself was captured late in the war and spent the rest of it in a Russian PoW camp, where he became ill (tuberculosis or something similar) and never really recovered. He survived the war but died in 1947 in a Berlin hospital.

What little I know of him indicates he was a decent man at heart, though he died more than 20 years before I was born. Can I respect him now? Would I have “supported” him as a soldier? Even though he was part of the Nazi war machine? I don’t know.

[Reply]

@double-plus-ungood
Let’s turn that around: do you prefer American torture to Taliban torture?

Does that sound as silly to you as it does to me?

If we’re going to adopt the tactics of the people we characterize as “the enemies of civilisation”, then how will we know if the good guys win?

There is little to suggest that the current generation of fighters in Afghanistan is “Taliban” rather than part of a loose arrangement of people agitating for political change through violence, whose members include poppy farmers and groups operating under the Al-Q umbrella.

But whoever they are–they are criminals, not just to the US but to most of the civilized world, as personified by the UN.

If they commit acts of murder and torture, they know that if they are caught they will face punishment.

The US has legalized torture. In the act that was passed there exists a paragraph specifically written to shield W. and co. from any threat of prosecution of punishment for war crimes (under US law) committed after September 12th, 2001. So they can go on torturing, secure in the knowledge that they will never face a trial for it.

Who is the more terrible: the criminals who torture and kill knowing it to be a criminal act, or the erstwhile civilized nation that makes torture part of its legal fabric?

And how can I, as a former soldier and “supporter of the troops”, favour supporting a regime that reserves the right to torture, knowing that the first casualty will be what little respect the Geneva Conventions retain?

I cannot support the use of our troops to prop up such strategy.

“Double-plus-ungood”–Is that a quote from Niven & Pournelle, by the way?

[Reply]

Urgh–sorry DPU. Note to self: post comments only after first cuppa coffee.

Obviously I need to re-read 1984. I recall the term from Inferno, a Niven/Pournelle trip through Hell. Perhaps a sly tip of the hats to Orwell?

Anyway, thanks for the correction.

[Reply]

Darren, when you ask how something can be bad at the macro level but supportable at the micro level I had to pause to try and figure my views out - which is always a good exercise.

For me, I DO support our troops. I even go so far as to wear red on Fridays. I support them on a macro level in that I support the need for a nation to have some kind of military presence. I believe that troops, in this way, ARE the macro and are, to me, more important than a specific war or tour of duty.

So, this is why I support our troops, but I do not support the reasons they are in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is only a small part of the picture of our military and our need for them - however, a mistake that keeps getting larger and larger.

Does that make sense?

[Reply]

The argument that you cannot support the troops without supporting the war is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. That’s like me stating that I support teachers, but don’t like how the principals, and other administrators under-pay and overwork them, then having some stooge saying “Well, you can’t support the teachers if you don’t support the administrative officials.”

Come on! I can support what the troops do: sacrificing there lives and energy for the safety of our nation, without having to bow down and blindly agree on how the U.S. government uses them. The troops don’t get to choose what war they fight or not.

[Reply]