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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ichy Smith who wrote (8848)	3/14/2006 6:14:59 PM
From: Stephen O	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37549

As usual Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail hits the nail on the head: Mr. Harper does Kandahar MARGARET WENTE What a coup. With one well-engineered surprise attack, Stephen Harper has slapped down the whiners who've accused his government of being AWOL on Afghanistan. He has rebuked the weak-kneed doubters who aren't sure we should be there at all. He's boosted the morale of the troops on the ground and, more important, he's bucked up the folks back home. He has won hearts and minds. He has even stirred an unfamiliar flicker of patriotism in the somnolent national breast. As you watch him greet the troops in Kandahar, you'd have to be a stone to not feel proud. How times change. It seems like only yesterday when Canadians were mocking George W. Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. What a shameless PR stunt! There were even rumours that the turkey he served up was a fake. (It wasn't.) But now that Mr. Harper's at the front, and our own soldiers' lives are on the line, the story line has changed. It seems like only yesterday when our media were portraying U.S. soldiers as dumb hicks who joined up mostly to escape life as Wal-Mart greeters. Our own troops, on the other hand, are dedicated, idealistic men and women who are eager to improve the world. The U.S. troops in Iraq are infected by blind jingoism; ours are moved by a desire to serve their country. Their soldiers are culturally insensitive yahoos who alienate the local population. Ours are well-trained diplomats who are careful to build good relations with the locals. The U.S. army is now so unpopular it can't meet its recruiting targets. But we . . . oh, never mind. We thought U.S. media coverage of Iraq was pretty dumb too. Remember how we criticized the way they embedded their reporters with the troops? As the foreign editor of the Toronto Star declared, embedding "was really serving the interest of the Pentagon more than anyone." We rolled our eyes at how CNN and the other media sentimentalized the soldiers. Well, that was then -- and them. Now that it's our turn, the Star could not embed its people fast enough. And I hope you caught Peter Mansbridge last week, live from Kandahar, as he conducted cloying double-enders between the brave kids in the field and their anxious mothers back home. When it's our war and our kids on the line, a certain amount of patriotic sentiment is irresistible. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you're still able to ask hard questions about the mission. There's nothing wrong with embedding either, so long as you don't swallow everything the generals tell you. It's about time our journalists learned the difference between a captain and a corporal. What strikes me is not how different our fighting forces are from theirs, but how alike. In Iraq, I saw the U.S. military up close. Guess what? They were among the most impressive, hardest-working men and women I have ever met. They too hoped to make the world a better place. And they too had a mission that was next to impossible. They were supposed to nation-build in the morning and root out the bad guys in the afternoon. "We have no training for this," said one officer. "We train for battle, but for nothing like this. How do you practise for something like this?" That's what I heard often in Iraq. But this time the speaker was a Canadian officer in Kandahar. He has been tasked with trying to determine whether the kid who killed the soldier with an axe during a peaceful village meeting was a genuine Talib, or just another angry kid. Good luck to him. In both places, the field of operations is dangerous. It's tough to tell the good guys from the bad, but even the good guys get upset when you search their house. In both places, the rhetoric is grand but the precise objectives are vague, and nobody really knows what success looks like. In truth, success probably means the situation isn't getting worse. Stephen Harper did the right thing when he went to Kandahar. It was political, but it was also what leaders are supposed to do. He made me feel proud of our military and our country. If only dedication, high ideals and patriotic sentiment were enough, we'd have this thing licked in no time. mwente@globeandmail.com theglobeandmail.com