Thursday, October 19, 2006

Ignatieff gets up with fleas

Columnist Lawrence Martin reports (in a column with the unwittingly (?) humourous heading "The man who would be PM hammers Bush") in this morning's Globe and Mail that Liberal-leadership (and thus potential prime minister) Michael Ignatieff recently said the following on Afghanistan:

The former Harvard professor made it clear he will not be hitching his wagon to any unilateralist empire-building. "I've supported the Afghan mission precisely because I don't want to live in an American imperial world... If we don't, as Canadians, want to live under American domination... then we have to have the courage to take on a difficult mission with our NATO partners and get it done. If we don't want a world run by the Americans, Canada has to lead."

That's some lofty load, alright. Let me rephrase it in clearer terms. "I had to go along with the bank heist, Your Honour, because I didn't want Lefty to have all the money. And if I didn't shoot the innocent bank tellers, he'd have probably shot me."

On Iraq, Ignatieff said the following:

...he said he takes "full responsibility for not having anticipated how incompetent the Americans would be. I don't have remaining confidence in the Americans... The Bush operation betrayed any hopes I had of Iraq transitioning to a stable political elite, and now all those hopes rest with my friends, the Iraqi political elite."

Political elite? What, is that Harvardese for "democracy" now? So in other words, Michael Ignatieff is perfectly fine with sponsoring state terrorism that kills tens of thousands of innocent civilians, provided A) they're foreigners, B) it's done slickly and isn't "incompetent", and C) replaces a dictatorship we don't get along with with a dictatorship that asks "how high?" when we tell it to jump. No questioning the morality of invading another nation to effect regime change to suit one's own self-interests (oh, and it'll help out the poor little Iraqis as a side bonus); no, that would be boring and get in the way the imperialism of which he claims to distain. Actually, he's tacitly admitting that, had he been prime minister at the time, he would have committed troops to this glorious enterprise, and they'd now be dying by the score alongside the other harbingers of Anglo-American imperialism.

Is this the man the Liberal Party wants to lead it, and potentially running Canada? Jesus, I hope not.

Go back to Harvard, Michael, where they pay you to spout your garbage harmlessly. Don't try foisting it on the apparatus of the Canadian state.

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