Brilliant. Gerald Caplan Explores How Canada Has Jumped Aboard America's Permanent War

This should make the Liberal faithful cringe - a lot.   Gerald Caplan explains how our leaders enlisted Canada into service of the most warlike nation ever, the United States.  As Caplan so rightly points out, we are joining America on the path to permanent war.  That's probably understandable from the radical Right but it's an abomination coming from someone who purports to lead the Liberal Party.

Read Caplan's piece and then ask yourself if the Liberal Party or Canada has anything to gain from this sort of leadership.  Caplan notes the passing last week of the American Chalmers Johnson.   Here's what the late Mr. Johnson thought about your Liberal Leader:

During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for  "humanitaian imperialism,"  also known as " Empire Lite."   As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and become a politician.  Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having use " we" and " us" some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled " Lesser Evils," which is a defense of official torture.

In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, 'Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis.  Yet what word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?  It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.'


In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: 'Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs...  Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty fo a state...  The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough.'


Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff's epistles to the Americans to 'a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), transforming Bush's blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.'

 Oh, I know, I know.   That was the American Michael Ignatieff, not the Canadian Michael Ignatieff who came to restore the Liberal Party to its former greatness.  Really?  Well guess what?  It's up to Michael Ignatieff to explain how someone claiming to be fit to lead the Liberal Party could have so recently and so persistently embraced the American warfare state.  How can a highly educated person simply ditch such boldly stated and repugnant views simply by returning to Canada?  On this, Mr. Ignatieff does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.  The burden of proving - and explaining - his transformation lies squarely with Mr. Ignatieff himself.  We're waiting.