Perhaps the ultimate legacy of the Bush/Cheney regime was the militarization of America's foreign policy by which the use or threat of military force came to displace diplomacy as the principle instrument of foreign policy. That Canada should succumb to this same contagion is as lamentable as it is inevitable in the era of neoliberalism.
Canada's militarized foreign policy could be summed up as, "we march to the sound of the guns."
The nature of the war doesn't much matter. We don't waste effort on the merits of what we're getting into, the objects we seek to attain or even how we'll get out of it and when. Those questions are irrelevant when you enlist in the Global Hegemon's Foreign Legion.
Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die. The difficult decisions we leave to others as we send our young men and women into harm's way.
The Americans have opted for air war in Iraq and Syria. Britain is in. So too is Australia. We hear the sound of their guns and so we march.
The merits of the war we assume to be self-evident from the participation of all the others with whom we seek no more than to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. What we may or may not accomplish doesn't matter. We quest only to "degrade" the enemy.
Like good Legionnaires we're going, not to war, but into battle. We'll do battle for six months. At the end of that we'll decide whether to continue doing battle. Wars are conflicts with outcomes that result in an end of hostilities. Battles can be waged forever without any terminal outcome.
This is what befalls nations that enlist in the Global Hegemon's Foreign Legion.
