A Canadian soldier is dead in Iraq

[pierrelebel]

Last October, in the House of Commons, Mr Harper:

“Today we are bringing forward a motion asking this House to confirm its confidence for a government decision to join our allies and partners – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and likely others – in launching air strikes against ISIL.

“In addition to these air strikes, the Government of Canada will, in response to requests from Iraqi authorities as well as other allies and partners, continue to assist in other, non-combat, counter-terrorism roles.

“We will also contribute one air-to-air refuelling aircraft, two Aurora surveillance aircraft, and the necessary air crews and support personnel.

“In addition we are extending the deployment in a non-combat role of the up to 69 members of the Canadian Army advising and assisting security forces in Iraq.

“There will however be no ground combat mission, which is explicitly ruled out in the resolution.

“These contributions are for a period of up to six months.

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How will the Conservative government spin the story to

- the family of the soldier killed in action?

- the rest of the Canadian community?

[kmilton2p]

There is no spinning to it. Most Canadians will understamd when you send military training advisors into a live combat zone there is the possibilty of death and/or injury.

[disisus]

Canada is the only country sending military training advisors into combat zones. There was no Parliamentary approval.

The U.S. military says Canada’s military advisers are the only coalition forces it knows of that have engaged in firefights with Islamic State militants in Iraq and that American troops have not, to date, been authorized to direct air strikes from the ground as Canadians are doing.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ndp-accuse-harper-of-misleading-parliament-over-islamic...

[art-in-the-making]

totally inexcusable blundering

It's pretty clear that, first of all, Harper is getting us into a quagmire over there

Secondly, there is a fair chance that our security will actually decrease proportionately to the amount we get involved over there

Trudeau forced to "go along" with Harper, due to the alarmist reports in our Conservative-inclined media

Still, I don't think there is any way this militaristic misadventure has a positive outcome for Harper. He lied about the initial deployment. Now the casualties begin. Now the extreme difficulty of actually achieving anything with this mission (which should have been obvious from the beginning) become even clearer.

By the way, I just heard there have been 26 snowmobile accident deaths in Quebec already this year. Yet so-called ""terrorism"" (emphasis on the quote-unquote) has dominated our newscasts, especially CTV, for the past 6 months. Does anything make sense here?