More on why Canada not included in Presidential honor roll - they don't deserve it:
Canada's war is already over
Manley's promise of ground troops is less manly than it sounds
Mark Steyn
National Post
Last Friday, while Canadians were demanding to know why they didn't rate a name-check in President Bush's speech, a unit of Britain's special forces, the SAS, came under enemy attack deep inside Afghanistan.
There's the answer.
If affronted Canucks would step back a moment, they'd see that the unusual feature of the Presidential address was that it was almost wholly free of the polite fictions of the foreign policy establishment. There was no mention of a "global coalition" or the United Nations, or, in military terms, of the French or Italians. In the Gulf War, the grand coalition's principal contribution was to tie one hand behind America's back. In Somalia, the Italians were giving nods and winks to the local warlord, General Aideed. In the Kosovo war, at least one French officer at NATO passed advance operational information on to the Serbs.
The difference is that, in those conflicts, the U.S. military was engaged in saving far distant Muslims -- Kuwaiti Muslims, Bosnian Muslims, Somali Muslims, Albanian Muslims (as should be obvious but sadly isn't, the U.S. armed forces are the world's pre-eminent defender of Muslims) -- and it was felt politic to observe the pretense that the ideal expeditionary force should look like a global affirmative-action program. This time, however, Boston and St. Louis, Miami and Denver are at stake, and the Bush administration sees no reason to mortgage their future to any country that thinks de-mothballing a rusting frigate entitles it to a set of keys to the command module.
The word from both countries is that this "coalition," on the battlefield, will be an Anglo-American affair: The U.S. is not interested in letting anybody else into the inner sanctums of joint command. The minimum entry qualifications are that a) you have a professional, modern military and b) you share America's war aims. The French meet the former but not the latter. The Mexicans the latter but not the former. The British meet both. The Canadians meet neither.
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