US Senator John McCain wants more American troops in Iraq, a lot more. He believes his country's goals for Iraq are unachievable without them. It's a problem common to Afghanistan where the shortage of forces, boots on the ground, is even greater.
Today, however, John McCain dared to take the debate to the next step, one where Bush and Harper and Blair don't have the courage to go:
"I believe victory is still attainable. ...But without additional combat forces we cannot win this war."
"As troubling as it is, I can ask a young marine to go back to Iraq. What I cannot do is ask him to return to Iraq, to risk life and limb, so that we might delay our defeat for a few months or a year. That is more to ask than patriotism requires. It would be immoral and I could not do it."
John McCain is absolutely right on this point. Whether you support or oppose the American mission in Iraq or the NATO mission in Afghanistan, it is immoral to leave our troops to risk life and limb to fight a campaign where they're so outnumbered that the outcome cannot be in doubt.
That's what the Harper government is doing to Canada's troops in Kandahar province. We voluntarily took responsibility for that province yet sent a force that was ridiculously too small for the job. Those soldiers have done a terrific job, magnificent, but we can't ask them to win victories that would require a force many times their size.
Canada's major domo on military affairs and Tory cheerleader, former general Lewis MacKenzie, entered the fray in an opinion piece in today's Globe & Mail finally acknowledging that the NATO mission is fatally undermanned and calling for another 30,000 combat troops for Afghanistan. I found the timing sort of odd. Where was this MacKenzie wisdom when it might have been useful, back when Harper rushed through a Commons debate on extending the mission? Why is this only coming out of MacKenzie's mouth now? More importantly, why did Lewis MacKenzie not raise the obvious point we heard from John McCain, that's it's immoral to expect soldiers of a hopelessly undermanned force to risk life and limb to postpone the inevitable?
I guess John McCain is a lot more soldier than Lewis MacKenzie.
1 comment:
Let's see - your Repugs have launched and run this war for five years and turned both campaigns into complete failures. However that's what your comment is about, not what this post is about. The article is about John McCain and his principled stand. He's a Republican, you know. Just not a far-right lunatic of the sort that started this insane adventure.
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